For 2.7.7, I think some combination of the two following ideas would be worth pursuing:
- a C runtime independent API flag (set by default on Windows when building with a compiler other than VS2008). This would largely be a backport of some of the stable ABI work from Python 3.
- getting Windows closer to the current Mac OS X situation by ensuring that the C runtime used directly affects the ABI flags and shared library names. PyPI would apply the Mac OS X guideline where extensions are expected to be compatible with the python.org binaries.
(Note, similar to the Mac OS X situation, I think we should do this without hosting any new interpreter variants on python.org -
VS2010 and VS2013 source builds would become separate build-from-source ecosystems for extensions, using sdists on PyPI as the default distribution mechanism)