"For the paid versions, I'm going to assume that anyone who paid for a compiler and doesn't know where their copy is, probably can't be helped ;-)" You could link to visualstudio.com for the trial versions, and maybe to a page/post about the PSF's grants process if such a page exists. "And of course there's the awkward problem that VS 2010 Express is unsupported and therefore no longer available from *any* official location. I can't solve that, sadly" These are still at http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs#Downlo..., which is the main download page. Hopefully they don't go away before 3.5, but I have no control over that unfortunately. The link I posted for 2.7 was aka.ms/vcpython27, which is a redirect that I own and can update if necessary. Cheers, Steve Top-posted from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Paul Moore<mailto:p.f.moore@gmail.com> Sent: 10/29/2014 15:48 To: Ethan Furman<mailto:ethan@stoneleaf.us> Cc: Python Dev<mailto:python-dev@python.org> Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Status of C compilers for Python on Windows On 29 October 2014 22:19, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
Yeah, I wondered about that. I'll work up a patch for that. But the more I think about it, it really is trivial:
I am reminded of an interview question I was once asked which was prefaced with: "Here's an easy one..."
My reply was, if you know the answer, it's easy!
Yeah, I know what you mean. My take on this is that I agree it's not easy if you don't know and can't get access to the information, but if you can, there's very little to it.
- For non-free MSVC, install the appropriate version, and everything just works. - For Python 2.7 (32 or 64 bit), install the compiler for Python 2.7 package and everything just works as long as you're using setuptools. - For 32 bit Python 3.2-3.4, install Visual Studio Express and everything just works. - For 64 bit Python 3.2-3.4, install the SDK, set some environment variables, and everything just works. - For Python 3.5+, install the current Visual Studion Express and everything just works.
I would suggest - where to get these packages
Conceded. Working out how to point people at stuff on MSDN is a challenge, things seem to move around. Maybe Steve Dower could help here with canonical URLs for some of them (IIRC, he provided one for the VS compilers for Python 2.7 package when it was announced). For the paid versions, I'm going to assume that anyone who paid for a compiler and doesn't know where their copy is, probably can't be helped ;-) And of course there's the awkward problem that VS 2010 Express is unsupported and therefore no longer available from *any* official location. I can't solve that, sadly.
- where to get any dependencies
There are none. I could state that explicitly, I guess.
- any options to [not] specify during install
I'll have to go through the installs again just to be sure, but I'm pretty certain "Select the default for everything" is correct.
- what environment variables to what value
None, except for the SDK which I did say I needed to test out and cover in more detail.
- where one should be at when one starts the compile process
I don't understand this. It's just "pip wheel foo" to build a wheel for foo (which will be downloaded), or "pip wheel ." or "python setup.py bdist_wheel" as you prefer for a local package. That's standard distutils/setuptools/pip extension building. I don't propose to cover that, just how to *set up* the environment. With the sole exception of the SDK case, once installed, everything just works everywhere, nothing to set up, no special environment to configure. Start up a new cmd or powershell console (or use the one you're already in) and go. Maybe Unix users expect more complexity because it's not that simple on Unix? But I thought it was - install the appropriate OS packages and that's it?
and, of course, a gotchas section for uncommon but frustrating things that might go wrong.
Hmm, I see your point here, but I'm not sure what I might include. You *can* get in a mess [1] but generally I don't as I'm an experienced Windows user. I also don't want to offer to debug and fix everyone's problems in getting things set up, so offering to collect and document "common issues" that I've seen is impractical. Maybe a section entitled "Common Issues and Their Solutions", with some placeholder text saying "If you have any issues installing any of the compiler packages mentioned, please document what went wrong and how to fix it, and submit a PR!" would do?
And thanks for doing this!
No problem! Paul [1] I once spent a *long* time fighting failed installs of the Windows SDK. Turns out it was because I was trying to install a 32-bit SDK on a 64-bit machine (doh!), and the installer really doesn't like that :-( About all I could say to document that is "Read the instructions properly" and "I'm sorry that the MS installers fail really badly when faced with relatively obvious idiot-user errors, but I can't do anything about it :-(" _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/steve.dower%40microsoft.c...