Robin Becker <robin@jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:
In article <r7xcezfq.fsf@python.net>, Thomas Heller <theller@python.net> writes .....
A patch to honor environment variables when they are set would help developers and, presumably, hurt no one. (No real Windows user would set an environment variable anyway.)
I'm not sure I'm in the position to pronounce on this, but: If someone comes up with a patch that does this, I have nothing against it. But I'm not prepared to support and/or debug configurations the users may have which are very different from my own.
this seems a bit harsh to me; I understand the part about being unable to debug, but surely this software is supposed to be a bit more robust.
Yes, it was too harsh, and I apologize for that. I was concerned about backwards compatibility and such.
It is after all the product of more than one person and is now in the standard distro. Even M$ gives us VCVARS32.BAT so they presumably believe in that. I don't buy the argument about having to use the gui to set stuff up as distutils is a script/command line tool.
Most probably a misunderstanding: Nobody needs to use the compiler gui or ide with distutils. *But the ide has to be started at least once* after installing MSVC 6 to create all the registry entries that distutils reads. It took quite some time to find this out, and I worked on quite a lot of bug reports to SF and on c.l.p for this. I don't know whether 7.x requires it or not.
I suppose we now face more difficult times with both MSC7/6 as the 'standard', but isn't that why distutils should consult the host python to determine which is preferable.
So, please someone submit a patch to let distutils use the environment. And apologies again, Thomas