[Distutils] MSVC CRT woes

[Moore, Paul]

From: Mark Hammond
>> 1. Installed copies of both Python 2.3 and 2.4.
>> 2. EITHER MSVC 6 and 7 (both versions) OR mingw

> Yes, that is true for all practical intent, if your installation
> has extension modules. However, for a pure-python distribution, you
> need *no* compilers installed. In that case, we still have a problem
> - at the moment, the installation is guaranteed to fail for either
> Python 2.3 and before, or for 2.4, depending on which CRTL was used
> to build wininst.exe.

> To clarify, I am talking about only how wininst.exe interacts with
> Python, not extension building related issues (even though they are
> similar).

Ah. I follow. In that case, yes I agree that practicality should beat
purity, and whatever works would make sense. My feeling is that reading
the file into a string and using the Py...RunString function is the
sensible option here.

After all (as I posted in python-dev) OLEAUT32.DLL uses MSVCRT.DLL, and
works happily with MSVC7-compiled DLLs (at least it had better!!!), so
there is at least *some* indication that DLLs can interact with EXEs
which use a different CRT (as long as sufficient care is taken).

Paul.