Compiling Python 2.4 extensions with free VC++ Toolkit

[Jody Burns]

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.

I looked through the CVS and couldn't find anything about this, although 
  msvccompiler.py has been patched to give a better error message about 
requiring the .NET framework if you have don't have it installed.

Your thoughts?

--Jody