[Distutils] MSVC CRT woes

[Mark Hammond]

> Just to understand this: will this mean that you have to have VC7
> in order to build extensions for Python 2.4 and onwards ?

Officially, I think it will.  Unofficially, it will remain like it does
today - it *may* work (depending on if you try and use Python API functions
that use FILE objects).  IIRC, there used to be a problem of you implemented
objects, as the malloc/free pairs happened in different CRTLs, but I think
that in recent versions the macro-magic means they do match)

A Python API function "PyFile_OpenFile()" would also solve this issue, but
obviously that wouldn't exist in 2.3 or earlier, so doesn't help this
specific case.

> I think it is worthwhile (and have always argued that way) to have one
> distutils version which can create Python distributables for various
> Python versions, including as many older versions as possible.

I believe that is the intent.  There is one other small issue I had trying
to do this for win32all, but I will address that later.

> Does the move to VC7 mean that we'll break this strategy with
> Python 2.4 distutils ?

Yes, unless we do as outlined in my mail.

Mark.