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

[Marius Gedminas]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 03:46:36PM +0000, Paul Moore 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 don't maintain any Python packages with C extensions, so I'm not sure
my feedback is useful.  Nevertheless:

I have a cloud VM running Windows Server WhicheverWasTheHighestNumberAtTheTime
with no C compilers on it.  (I don't think the bits of Mingw that come
with Git for Windows include gcc.)

I have all the relevant versions of Python installed on it, with added
setuptools and pip in each.  IIRC I also installed tox and virtualenv
into their site packages.

I use this VM as a Jenkins slave to run tests of various Python
packages.  Some of them need binaries, and I rely on package maintainers to
upload Windows wheels to PyPI.  Since *of course* they don't all do that, so I
have to maintain a set of wheels automatically converted from .exe and
.egg installers with https://github.com/mgedmin/wheelwright.

Anything that makes it easier for package maintainers build Windows
wheels would be very welcome!

Marius Gedminas
-- 
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong
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