Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
If I were maintaining the Windows port (which I'm not), I would dislike the solution because it would mean I have to learn scons...
It is only an alternative to learning a new tool for converting VC project files to nmake specific makefile.
It's different. That tool would have to be written from scratch, which would be a large effort for a single person. Learning scons would be a relatively small effort for a relatively large group of people (not only immediate maintainers of the Windows port, but anybody contributing to it, also).
That's true. You have to make the modifications in the scons file, but that modifications (usually adding or removing some c module, or I'm missing something?) can be used by VC/cygwin/mgwin/*nix user... potentially.
The more typical modification is the addition of an extension module, which means adding a new target. That becomes more and more tricky these days, as these new targets often have prerequisites that are difficult to build themselves (e.g. finding an available copy of OpenSSL, invoking Perl to build OpenSSL, invoking nmake to build zlib, etc). I somewhat doubt that the scons-to-vcproj generator gets such complex build dependencies correct - at which point the maintainers would need to look into the inner workings of scons to find out if it really can represent the build step in all supported "output build procedures", and how to make scons do it correctly.
But that leave you with the original problem... makefiles for the free microsoft compiler...
That, of course, is not a problem for the majority of the Python-Windows contributors, who already have a copy of VC 7.1 (thanks to a generous offer earlier this year). So for whoever this is a problem, they would need to find a solution. They need to find a way today already (as Python does not provide nmake files out of the box at the moment, either). The solution does not need to materialize itself next week, as the release of Python 2.4 is still months away.
I've done some month ago a scratch scons script for VC6 and VC7 compilation of the core python dll, pythonw.exe and python.exe...
I must take a look to my messy sandbox at works!
You could also maintain this "outside" of the standard Python distribution, as some kind of "drop-in" zip file. That would put no obligation onto you - your users could either use it, or leave it (and we could advertise it as an alternative somewhere). Regards, Martin