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

[Donald Stufft]

> On Nov 7, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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As an *nix user I have a Windows 7 VM on my OS X machine that I can also
dual boot into which I mostly use for playing games that won’t play on
my OS X box natively. It does not have Python or any development tooling
installed on it.

I also have access to the cloud(tm) which is where I normally spin up
a whatever-the-most-recent-looking-name Windows Server.

---
Donald Stufft
PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA