Hi all,
I've been wondering if there's anything on the drawing board about patching distutils/msvccompiler.py so that it can compile Python extensions using the free Visual C++ toolkit instead of the entire Visual C++ development environment.
I know it's possible, because I was able to compile and install PyCrypto 2.0 for Python 2.4 today. I did this by commenting out the part of msvccompiler that checks for VS library paths and manually adding them to my LIB environment variable.
Been messing around with that myself earlier today.
I just added the registry keys that msvccompiler.py was looking for. And pointed them to the toolkit and sdk paths. Worked just fine.
It worked to build PIL 1.1.4 for python 2.4 today, although without freetype2 support. Probably just needs some minor tweaking to get it in there as well.
I'll have to grab the source of some other extensions, and see how they turn out as well.
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