On 25 January 2000, Robin Becker said:
Perhaps the msvccompiler.py class should take care of this too... it would sure help to avoid a distutils FAQ.
I'll happily accept patches! (I'd prefer not to be the one to translate a Microsoft-written batch file into Python: there're reasons I abandoned DOS almost 6 years ago, and batch files were one of them...)
Surely msvccompiler can tell if a particular file (say cl.exe) isn't in any of the well known places.
Depends what you mean by "well-known places". If you mean os.environ['PATH'], then the spawn module can (and should) do a bit of work ahead of time to see if the expected command is really there. Also, somebody somewhere should probably catch that exception and die without a traceback. Not sure whose responsibility that is; I guess it belongs in the compiler class (MSVCCompiler in this case). If you mean encoding some knowledge about where MSVC++ is "typically" installed, then that might belong in the MSVCCompiler class. I'll need a good explanation and broad consensus from the Windows experts in the crowd before I'll put that kind of code in, though. As for dreaming about searching the registry: as long as it's not available under Python 1.5.*, then I don't want Distutils to depend on it. Greg