From: Mark Hammond
1. Installed copies of both Python 2.3 and 2.4. 2. EITHER MSVC 6 and 7 (both versions) OR mingw
Yes, that is true for all practical intent, if your installation has extension modules. However, for a pure-python distribution, you need *no* compilers installed. In that case, we still have a problem - at the moment, the installation is guaranteed to fail for either Python 2.3 and before, or for 2.4, depending on which CRTL was used to build wininst.exe.
To clarify, I am talking about only how wininst.exe interacts with Python, not extension building related issues (even though they are similar).
Ah. I follow. In that case, yes I agree that practicality should beat purity, and whatever works would make sense. My feeling is that reading the file into a string and using the Py...RunString function is the sensible option here. After all (as I posted in python-dev) OLEAUT32.DLL uses MSVCRT.DLL, and works happily with MSVC7-compiled DLLs (at least it had better!!!), so there is at least *some* indication that DLLs can interact with EXEs which use a different CRT (as long as sufficient care is taken). Paul.