I have a set of extensions that use SWIG to wrap my own C++ library. This library, on a day-to-day basis is built against VS8 since the rest of our product suite is. Right now I have no way to work with this code using VS8 since the standard distribution is built against VS7 which uses a different CRT. This is an absolute nightmare in practice since I currently have to maintain VS7 projects in parallel with the standard VS8 ones simply so that I can run and test my python code.
If you know well enough what you are doing, and avoid using unsupported cases, you *can* mix different CRTs.
Building using the current projects I seem to get everything in the PCBuild8 / PCBuild dirs. How can I work with what is build?
Python works correctly out of its build directory. You can just run it from there.
Is there a shell script to build a final distribution tree?
Not sure what you mean by "tree". Distribution is in a single MSI file, not in a tree, and the tree that gets created on the target machine (of the MSI file) never exists on the source machine.
If not, is there a simple way to build an MSI similar to the one found on the Python.org site for the official releases but using the PCBuild8 stuff?
No, but it should be possible to adopt Tools/msi to package pcbuild8 instead. Just make sure you are using different GUIDs as the ProductCode. Regards, Martin