I'm not quite a '-1', but am a little confused about where this would leave us. To some extent, this would formalize PCBuild8 and VC6 directories. External tools would then slowly start growing support for these additional directories and the previous benefits of "PCBuild is the canonical location" appear to vanish. Further, I expect that such a patch would confuse any attempts to manually copy from PCBuild8 into PCBuild, for example (ie, some tools knowing about PCBuild8 while others assume PCBuild is likely to get confusing.)
Trent: I assume you use the same source tree for multiple platforms and compilers, meaning that changing these "optional" build processes to copy from PCBuild8/VC6 into PCBuild would cause pain? If not, do you think that would be a reasonable solution?
Changing to have bits always in PCbuild would work for me -- i.e. I *don't* build for multiple compilers/platforms in the same tree. Perhaps that is a better solution -- in the long run, anyway. Having the "bits" always in one dir for whatever the configuration is more akin to the Unix-y configure/make system. Is this something that could work for Python 2.5? Or just 2.6? Long term/aside: Moving to a configure/make build system on Windows, as you proposed in your first email, would be interesting. With MSYS though, not cygwin (a la bsmedberg's new MozillaBuild stuff). I just wish there were an autoconf alternative that wasn't as painful as autoconf. I have a few attempts for my purposes that are written in Python (an obvious bootstrapping problem for building Python itself :). Trent -- Trent Mick trentm at activestate.com