Failing to setup environment

[Digital_Pig]

Hey guys,

So this may have been approached 100 different ways by 500 different people, but right now the search gives me a 500 error every time, so I have to post it.

When running a requirements check, I get to cryptography and it fails. Something very curious is is that "cryptographt>=2.1.4" when ran under Windows produces a file called "=2.1.4" (because > is redirection) which contains some information about a failing cryptography library...hmmm...possibly completely not the cause.

The error message when checking requirements is:
TypeError: '>=' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'str'
which comes from a failure for the build script to find the correct version of ld,exe. Adding some debugging in to the script, this finds:
/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-msys/9.1.0/../../../../i686-pc-msys/bin/ld.exe which is the equivalent of /usr/i686-pc-msys/bin/ld.exe

I found the version from this and hardcoded it just to see how much further it would get: it got to the point of building openssl object, which is where it stopped trying to do:

i686-w64-mingw32-gcc -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -march=i686 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fwrapv -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO=1 -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0601 -DNDEBUG -march=i686 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fwrapv -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO=1 -D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0601 -DNDEBUG -IE:/esp/msys32/mingw32/include/python3.8 -c build/temp.mingw-3.8/_openssl.c -o build/temp.mingw-3.8/build/temp.mingw-3.8/_openssl.o

error: command 'i686-w64-mingw32-gcc' failed: No such file or directory

At this point I'm pretty stumped. I can run some of the examples, but anything that requires cryptography I cannot, and I need this for the esp-va-sdk I'm trying to flash to a LyraTD-MSC board.

In the last 2 days I think I've tried every solution, including deleting everything and starting over.

Windows 10
MSYS32 from the latest zip package from the site
Python running @3.8 from a Mingw32 console

I've thought about going the cmake route as some people say that works for them, but I'm not easily phased and know it's just a missing library or something somewhere.

Is there a reason someone hasn't just created a container image with all of this working?

Thanks for any help.
Paul