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

[Jonathan Helmus]

On 11/07/2014 09:46 AM, 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'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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Paul,

     This sounds like a very useful project.  I do most my development 
in Linux or OS X but occasionally spin up a Windows VM locally or in the 
cloud to produce some Python wheels or conda packages.  The one 
annoyance I find is that I need to use an RDP client to connect to the 
instance as opposed to using ssh as I do when connecting to a Unix 
machine.  If the VM could support ssh connections this would reduce this 
burden.  I am not familiar enough with Windows to know how feasible this 
is but it would allow Unix users to use the tools they are likely 
already familiar with.

      - Jonathan Helmus