Just to understand this: will this mean that you have to have VC7 in order to build extensions for Python 2.4 and onwards ?
Officially, I think it will. Unofficially, it will remain like it does today - it *may* work (depending on if you try and use Python API functions that use FILE objects). IIRC, there used to be a problem of you implemented objects, as the malloc/free pairs happened in different CRTLs, but I think that in recent versions the macro-magic means they do match) A Python API function "PyFile_OpenFile()" would also solve this issue, but obviously that wouldn't exist in 2.3 or earlier, so doesn't help this specific case.
I think it is worthwhile (and have always argued that way) to have one distutils version which can create Python distributables for various Python versions, including as many older versions as possible.
I believe that is the intent. There is one other small issue I had trying to do this for win32all, but I will address that later.
Does the move to VC7 mean that we'll break this strategy with Python 2.4 distutils ?
Yes, unless we do as outlined in my mail. Mark.