[PyQt] Help with getting sip built on Windows

[Neil Jansen]

I'm trying to get the commercial version of PyQt5 built in Windows, and I'm
stuck.

The tl;dr is that I'm looking for one of two things:

1) An official wheel distribution of sip that's greater than 4.19.11

or,

2) A layman's guide to setting up a build environment to compile sip, that
was written on or after 2017 (because Microsoft's releases and download
links changed after that date).

I'm trying to do this with the freely available tools that can be
downloaded from Microsoft's site, I haven't budgeted for a full copy of MS
VC++ / Visual Studio nor have I even looked to see what those have costed,
I'm assuming that I can do it with free tools but again, I've not found a
concrete guide that gives this information.

And ideally, I'm looking for a guide that assumes that I have basic C/C++
skills (I can compile C++ code fine on Linux and Mac, which are quite
pleasant), but cannot manage to figure out how to get the MS VC++ toolchain
installed due to a mixture of ignorance of what the toolchain ecosystem
consists of, and complexity / fragility of Microsoft's toolchain when being
run from a commandline (Having to start in certain shells to have the
environment variables just right, and the fact that it's such a moving
target, with so many operating systems and SDK versions to keep track of).


For more details of where I'm actually stuck at, read below, or just skip
it as it's kind of long-winded and is only supplemental to my question.

-----

Here's the list of events that led up to the question(s) above:

I'm able to build the commercial wheel for PyQt5, from the instructions
provided.  In order to install the wheels, it's needing a dependency to the
sip package.  OK let's go get that.

First stop was Riverbank's download page but they don't release wheels
directly.

Next stop was pypi because I know they'll be there.  Latest distributable
wheel version of sip on pypi.org is 4.19.8.  So I attempt to use that as a
dependency when installing the
'PyQt5_commercial-5.11.3-5.12.1-cp35.cp36.cp37.cp38-none-win_amd64.whl'
file.  That fails, due to a dependency error.  It requires sip version >=
4.19.11, < 4.20.

OK so maybe I can install it from source?  (on Windows, ugh)

I download the source (currently at 4.19.13) from riverbank, go through the
instructions, get it configured, and then try to run 'make', per the
instructions on riverbank's site.  I google a bit, find some mailing list
threads that mention using 'nmake' because it it's Windows and they have to
do everything different.  I've previously attempted to install MSVC2015 for
various other Python / Cython reasons.  Cython works fine, but nmake fails
the first time I run it.  'cl.exe' is not found.  I google some more, and
end up installing Microsoft 2017 build tools.  I couldn't even find the
2015 build tools and it seems like Microsoft has either pulled it /
deprecated it, or is making the link really hard to find (most '2015 build
tools' links redirect to '2017 build tools').  So after a half-hour and a
reboot, still no luck.  This time, I get an even weirder error, cl.exe
returned D8021, invalid numeric argument /FS.  I google more, something
about making sure you're running 'vcvars32.bat', but I have no such file on
my system.  Most of the information is pre-2015 or returns 404's because
Microsoft re-organizes their page without bothering to give the common
courtesy of a redirect.  This is frustrating.

At this point, I've basically given up and admitted defeat.  I can't find a
single guide of how to get the build system 100% setup in Microsoft
Windows.  Microsoft's support pages are so scattered and broken and
unorganized and irrelevant that I have no idea what I even need to
download.  Searches for "python" and "Visual C++" usually bring up the
opposite (trying to get python environment installed inside visual studio
).  So it's not that I'm not trying, it's just really difficult to sort out
the relevant from the irrelevant.

So is there a guide that I missed somewhere?  I've looked everywhere and
can't find it, if it exists.  Any help would be appreciated.
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