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

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Fri Nov 23 16:43:59 CET 2007

Tim Golden wrote:

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've changed the build_ssl.py script to build openssl for nasm instead of ml/masm. The MS assembler for x86 is only available in the standard and professional version. While it's possible to extract it from the SDK package I don't see the point in installing several hundreds of MB when less than one MB free a free assembler is more than fine.

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).

I've a preliminary patch for distutils.msvccompiler at http://bugs.python.org/issue1455. I haven't applied the patch because it's not backward compatible with VC 7 and VS 6. We haven't yet agreed how to address backward compatibility.

I really like to throw out the old junk to have a clean script. Maybe I could leave the old msvccompiler alone and put the new code into distutils.msvc9compiler?

Christian

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