I am a package maintainer for a Python package that provides an interface to an academic project. The main code is written in C and there are some Python scripts to add some extra functionality. The core C code is relatively portable (for C) but does not currently build using the MS Visual Studio Compiler. I do not have enough Windows users that this is a problem right now, and I am fine with simply telling them that they need to do some extra work to use MinGW to install the Python package (as they need to do to use the core package).
The package uses PEP517 because deprecation warnings from prior standards gave me the impression that I needed to migrate. However, I have now discovered that the --global-option flag (specified by this post) is unavailable for PEP517 packages meaning there is no clear way to specify MinGW as the compiler.
I discovered that there is a --config-settings flag for PEP517 packages, but trying the obvious settings (compiler=mingw64) did not change anything.
How can I tell pip to use mingw64 as the compiler for my package on Windows? If there was a way to put this information in the package itself, that would be even better, but I am happy with just being able to install it with some extra command-line parameters.
