[Distutils] MSVC7 directories

[Robin Becker]

In article <9bdd01c3e9d7$49dce680$0200a8c0 at eden>, Mark Hammond
<mhammond at skippinet.com.au> writes
......
>> Always seemed a bit daft to do this implicitly from the IDE (eg when I
>> set things up for stackless my ordinary stuff seems to see the wrong
>> paths).
>
>Not sure what you mean here?  I did find it strange that I could not setup
>the compiler as I would for any other project on the planet (ie, vie the env
>vars that the compiler itself supports), but that was pronounced to be a
>feature of distutils, so I dropped it.
>

I just feel it strange as you do that the tool should rely on another
tool to do setup. I regularly use distutils with several different
python versions. I would be lucky to be able to set up a single set of
include/lib dirs that would work for all. That's not to say that some
base set might be useful, but that's what I thought the base environment
vars were for.

>> There is special code in there about version >=7 though.
>>
>>         if self.__version >= 7:
>>             key =
>> (r"%s\%0.1f\VC\VC_OBJECTS_PLATFORM_INFO\Win32\Director
>> ies"
>>                    % (self.__root, self.__version))
>>         else:
>>             key = (r"%s\6.0\Build System\Components\Platforms"
>>                    r"\Win32 (%s)\Directories" % (self.__root,
>> platform))
>
>Yes, I did see that special code.  My issue is that MSVC7.1 is not storing
>these paths in the registry at all.
>

Again I see nothing unusual in VCxxx storing most of a project setup in
a more and more opaque form. I would be a bit surprised if it stores
nothing globally though. I am speaking blindly as I don't have access to
7 yet. I would prefer the priorities to be 1) environment, 2) python
version, 3) compiler/tool global. 

>If you combine these 2 facts together (can't use env vars, MSVC doesn't
>store in the registry), it currently seems *impossible* to get MSVC7 to use
>an alternative path under distutils.  My patch tries to address this (even
>if it seems the wrong one to support to me <wink>)
>
>Can anyone else at least confirm that changing the directories in MSVC7 does
>not write the new paths to the registry?  The standard paths seem to be
>written there at installation time, but changing paths in DevStudio does not
>change these registry values.
>
>Mark.
...
-- 
Robin Becker