[Distutils] RE: Distutils prerequisites (Greg Ward)

[Greg Ward]

On 10 April 2000, Lyle Johnson said:
> Visual C++ versions 5 and 6 only had ".0" releases (no intermediate releases
> like VC++ 4.2), so for your first requirement x = '0'. There are a few
> service packs available for VC++ 6 but I don't believe any of them were
> *required* for building Python extensions.

OK, here's the updated "REQUIREMENTS" section in the Distutils
README.txt:

  Release 0.8 of the Distutils requires Python 1.5.2 or later.
  (Compatibility with Python 1.5.1 is forthcoming, as soon as I merge the
  1.5.1 compatibility changes from Distutils 0.1.4 and 0.1.5 forward.)

  To use the Distutils under Unix, you must have a *complete* Python
  installation, including the Makefile and config.h used to build Python.
  These should be in <exec-prefix>/lib/python1.X/config.  (<exec-prefix>
  is the value of the --exec-prefix option to Python's configure script,
  or the --prefix option if --exec-prefix wasn't supplied; if neither was
  supplied, the default is "/usr/local".  If you don't know your
  <exec-prefix>, fire up the Python interpreter and type
  "import sys ; sys.exec_prefix".)

  Certain Linux distributions break Python up into multiple packages; you
  should make sure you have all required packages installed:

     Red Hat            python, python-devel
     Mandrake           python, python-devel
     SuSE               python
     Debian             python-base, python-dev

  In order to build extensions on any platform, you will need a C/C++
  compiler.  On Unix, the compiler used to build Python itself will be
  used by default, and should do the trick; if you didn't build Python,
  then hopefully you'll find out pretty quickly whether building
  extensions works or not.

  To build extensions on Windows, you need Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 or
  6.0.  It also helps to have access to the Windows registry from Python;
  if you have the Win32 extensions (win32api, win32con) installed, you're
  fine.  (Python 1.6 includes the winreg module for this purpose, which
  the Distutils will use if available.)  If not, the Distutils might not
  be able to find the Visual C++ executables.

The last two paragraphs didn't make it into Distutils 0.8: oh well.
Just as well, I want to make sure that last paragraph is accurate first!
Please tell me how close I am to reality there...

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - just another /P(erl|ython)/ hacker          gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
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