[Python-Dev] Build Notes for building trunk with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition

[Tim Golden]

Paul Moore wrote:
> I have just built the current trunk version of Python on Windows,
> using the new PCBuild9 directory, and Visual Studio 2008 Express
> Edition.
> 
> Everything went extremely well. I include below my notes on what I
> did, for reference. To be honest, there's nothing in here that really
> warrants a change to the readme.txt - to all intents and purposes, the
> process "just works".

My experience also. Thanks v. much to Christian for the work
on this one.

> _ssl
> ----
> 
> Christian has been making changes to allow this to build without Perl,
> so I gave it a try. I used openssl 0.9.8g, which I extracted to the
> build directory (I noticed afterwards that this is the same version as
> in Python svn, so I could have used the svn external!)
> 
> I needed to download nasm (nasm.sf.net) version 2.00rc1, and rename
> nasm.exe to nasmw.exe and put it on my PATH.

Ah. Thanks for that last bit. I thought this might not build
without the full VS, so I didn't try poking round for a
nasm-alike.

I managed to fudge distutils around sufficiently to build
the standard Pyrex primes testcase as an extension. I noticed
that Christian has committed patches to the py3k trunk which
do useful things with the vcvars.bat file to pick up the
compiler environment, so I was going to email him privately to
look at backporting those into 2.6. This, my first experience
of hacking distutils, felt a little like clambering over a
construction site, with lots of ungainly "if it's v6; if it's v7"
stuff obviously reflecting the vagaries of Microsoft's registry
layout changes over the different compiler flavours.

For practicality's sake I'd very much like to help get this
to the point where you can build Python *and* extensions with
the VS Express compilers (including, critically, the pywin32
stuff).

TJG