This stems from PR #22998

Problem

In that PR, we are trying to update third_party/protobuf to version v3.12.0. We ran into a Python test failure involving Python 2.7 Windows Artifact build.

Here's the error:

third_party\protobuf\src/google/protobuf/port_def.inc:457:54: error: expected primary-expression before ')' token
   PROTOBUF_EXPORT_TEMPLATE_##which##_##style(export, )
...
FAILED: build_artifact.python_windows_x64_Python27

Full Log: https://source.cloud.google.com/results/invocations/b95cf1f2-191b-4fdb-8554-413524992d91/targets/grpc%2Fcore%2Fpull_request%2Fwindows%2Fgrpc_build_artifacts/log

Investigation

Seems to be caused by this PR: protocolbuffers/protobuf#7344, and originally protocolbuffers/protobuf#6535

Same error encountered by other protobuf users in: protocolbuffers/protobuf#6659

Note: only Python 2.7 failed. Python 3.5 - 3.8 tests passed. We discovered the discrepancy is because we use mingw32 to compile for Python 2.7, but msvc for Python 3: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/tools/run_tests/artifacts/artifact_targets.py#L168.

Alternative tried

We temporarily try to use msvc to compile for Python 2.7 but run into a different set of errors:

Error:

.\src/core/lib/iomgr/error.h(24) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'inttypes.h': No such file or directory

Full Log: https://source.cloud.google.com/results/invocations/e40abd1d-971c-43bc-8eb3-8b958b9a4375/targets/grpc%2Fcore%2Fpull_request%2Fwindows%2Fgrpc_build_artifacts/log

Logging this issue separately to track this investigation.

Next steps

• Either see if we can get mingw updated
• Or see if we can switch to using msvc