Compiling Python 2.4 extensions with free VC++ Toolkit

[Grumman]

Jody Burns > wrote:
> 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.