One of the most annoying steps in building the Windows installers is generating the libpython38.a file. It's annoying, because it requires having "generic enough" MinGW tools to ensure that the file is compatible with whatever version of MinGW might be trying to build against the regular Windows distribution. I would like to stop shipping this file in 3.8 and instead put the steps into the docs to show people how to generate them themselves (with the correct version of their tools): gendef python38.dll > tmp.def dlltool --dllname python38.dll --def tmp.def --output-lib libpython38.a -m i386:x86-64 (Obviously the commands themselves are not complicated if you already have gendef and dlltool, but currently a normal CPython build system does not have these.) Before just doing this, I wanted to put out a request for information: * Do you rely (or know anyone who relies) on libpython38.a on Windows? * Are you able to add the two commands above to your build? If not, why not? Thanks, Steve