[Distutils] Call for information - What assumptions can I make about Unix users' access to Windows?

[Paul Moore]

I'm in the process of developing an automated solution to allow users
to quickly set up a Windows box so that it can be used to compile
Python extensions and build wheels. While it can obviously be used by
Windows developers who want to quickly set up a box, my main target is
Unix developers who want to provide wheels for Windows users.

To that end, I'd like to get an idea of what sort of access to Windows
a typical Unix developer would have. I'm particularly interested in
whether Windows XP/Vista is still in use, and whether you're likely to
already have Python and/or any development tools installed. Ideally, a
clean Windows 7 or later virtual machine is the best environment, but
I don't know if it's reasonable to assume that.

Another alternative is to have an Amazon EC2 AMI prebuilt, and users
can just create an instance based on it. That seems pretty easy to do
from my perspective but I don't know if the connectivity process
(remote desktop) is a problem for Unix developers.

Any feedback would be extremely useful. I'm at a point where I can
pretty easily set up any of these options, but if they don't turn out
to actually be usable by the target audience, it's a bit of a waste of
time! :-)

Thanks,
Paul