[Distutils] MSVC CRT woes

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Mark Hammond wrote:
>>The latter would mean having to support 3-4 different distutils
>>versions in your setup code. We already support 3-4 different Python
>>versions (at Python and C level) and would like, if at all possible,
>>to continue building all packages with one distutils version - the
>>one in CVS which is the most up-to-date.
> 
> Just to throw one more minor spanner in the works, I believe I will be able
> to provide a patch that means you must *build* your extension with the
> Python version that the version targets - but can create a binary
> distribution, for any Python version, using a single distutils version
> (assuming it was previously built correctly)

That would be ideal.

> I agree that in the future we should also allow you to build your extensions
> using the most recent, but that is far less critical when you consider other
> users - if someone other than the primary packager wants to build your
> package, they probably don't have the 'latest' distutils available to them.

True, but at least I can point at a place where to download and
install it (not the CVS one, but latest released one).

I think that's a reasonable thing to ask from users if they
want to build wininst packages that are different from the
ones we distribute.

 From source installations (still) work rather nicely across
all distutils versions - at least on Unix platforms which is where
people care about source installations. Windows folks are
happy with the wininst installer, so it's a non-issue for
those.

>>That said, I think that including two wininst versions, one
>>compiled with VC6, the other with VC7, would solve this problem
>>nicely. You'd still have to have VC6/7 for compiling C extensions,
>>but at least generating pure Python distutils wininst packages
>>would remain possible.
> 
> Keeping the 'practicallity beats purity' theme, I agree.  It means that
> whoever builds (and checks into CVS) wininst.exe must has *both* MSVC6 and
> MSVC7, but there is a good chance they will anyway.
> 
> Is there any reason wininst.exe is not itself built using distutils?

No idea :-) That one is for Thomas to answer.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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