[Distutils] WinNT and distutils

[Greg Ward]

On 25 January 2000, Robin Becker said:
> >Perhaps the msvccompiler.py class should take care of this too...
> >it would sure help to avoid a distutils FAQ.

I'll happily accept patches!  (I'd prefer not to be the one to translate
a Microsoft-written batch file into Python: there're reasons I abandoned
DOS almost 6 years ago, and batch files were one of them...)

> Surely msvccompiler can tell if a particular file (say cl.exe) isn't in
> any of the well known places.

Depends what you mean by "well-known places".  If you mean
os.environ['PATH'], then the spawn module can (and should) do a bit of
work ahead of time to see if the expected command is really there.

Also, somebody somewhere should probably catch that exception and die
without a traceback.  Not sure whose responsibility that is; I guess it
belongs in the compiler class (MSVCCompiler in this case).

If you mean encoding some knowledge about where MSVC++ is "typically"
installed, then that might belong in the MSVCCompiler class.  I'll need
a good explanation and broad consensus from the Windows experts in the
crowd before I'll put that kind of code in, though.

As for dreaming about searching the registry: as long as it's not
available under Python 1.5.*, then I don't want Distutils to depend on
it.

        Greg