[Guido]
Tim & I have different beliefs here. Tim believes that if something works on one flavor of Windows, that says nonthing about the other flavors. I believe that when it works on one flavor, you can assume that it works on all, unless proof to the contrary is shown. I'm sure we both have experience to back this up. :-)
It depends on whether "something" relies on behavior that's more due to the OS than to C. It's really the same as whether something that works on one flavor of Unix works on all other flavors of Unix. The latest Windows example was just last week, where someone's "clever" use of the new tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile in the Zope test suite worked fine on Win9X but died with an IOError on Win2K, and couldn't be fixed short of rewriting that part of the code from scratch. The bz2 code, and especially its test suite, had Unix-specific stuff at first, but I didn't see anything plausibly Windows-flavor-specific in it (or Unix-flavor-specific either).
... If you could get Python from CVS, build it with MSVC 6.0 for Windows (elaborate instructions are in PCBuild/readme.txt!!!), and see if the bz2 module works on all flavors of Windows to which you have access, that would be tremendously helpful IMO.
Yes it would. You can't know for sure until it's tried. Don't forget the French and German variants of Windows too <wink>.