How to install Python package from source on Windows

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 9:54 AM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> There's also the fact that Microsoft doesn't make the free
> versions of Visual Studio available forever and forbids anyone
> else distributing them, so sufficiently old versions are
> simply not available to most people.

Yes and no. The Python.org support policy is that Python X.Y will be
supported on Windows Z if and only if Windows Z was supported by
Microsoft as of when Python X.Y.0 was released. This means that, for
instance, Python 3.3 supported Windows XP, but Python 3.7 won't. If
you need a Win2K-compatible compiler, you're using a too-old version
of Python, and nobody's going to support that.

There is, however, one exception. Python 2.7 supports Windows XP, and
a specific version of MSVC (I don't remember which off-hand) that is
now unsupported by Microsoft. However, *specifically for Python
extension developers*, Microsoft offers the zero-dollar version of
that compiler still, and will for a decent while (again, I don't
remember the specifics, but it's something comparable to Py2.7's own
upstream support).

So in general, "sufficiently old versions" should actually still be available.

ChrisA