[Distutils] MSVC7 directories

[Thomas Heller]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> In article <r7xcezfq.fsf at python.net>, Thomas Heller <theller at python.net>
> writes
> .....
>>> 
>>> A patch to honor environment variables when they are set would help
>>> developers and, presumably, hurt no one.  (No real Windows user would set an
>>> environment variable anyway.)
>>
>>I'm not sure I'm in the position to pronounce on this, but: If someone
>>comes up with a patch that does this, I have nothing against it.  But
>>I'm not prepared to support and/or debug configurations the users may
>>have which are very different from my own.
>>
>
> this seems a bit harsh to me; I understand the part about being unable
> to debug, but surely this software is supposed to be a bit more robust.

Yes, it was too harsh, and I apologize for that.  I was concerned about
backwards compatibility and such.

> It is after all the product of more than one person and is now in the
> standard distro. Even M$ gives us VCVARS32.BAT so they presumably
> believe in that. I don't buy the argument about having to use the gui to
> set stuff up as distutils is a script/command line tool.

Most probably a misunderstanding: Nobody needs to use the compiler gui
or ide with distutils.

*But the ide has to be started at least once* after installing MSVC 6 to
create all the registry entries that distutils reads.  It took quite
some time to find this out, and I worked on quite a lot of bug reports
to SF and on c.l.p for this. I don't know whether 7.x requires it or
not.


> I suppose we now face more difficult times with both MSC7/6 as the
> 'standard', but isn't that why distutils should consult the host
> python to determine which is preferable.
>

So, please someone submit a patch to let distutils use the environment.

And apologies again,

Thomas