Is there some reason that recent Windows 3.6 releases don't included executable nor msi installers?

[Adam Preble]

On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 7:57:04 PM UTC-5, Terry Reedy wrote:
> The OP is so far choosing to not use an installer with those fixes.  By 
> not doing so, he is missing out on the maybe 2000 non-security fixes and 
> some enhancements that likely would benefit him more than maybe 50 
> mostly obscure fixes added between 3.6.8 and 3.6.10*.  If a rare user 
> such as Adam also chooses to not compile the latter, that is his choice.

I was going to just stay mute about why I was even looking at 3.6.10, but I
felt I should weigh in after some of the other responses. I think somebody
would find the issues interesting.

We had found what looked like a bug in the Python Launcher where it would
eat command line arguments meant for the script. I would find some stuff missing from sys.argv in a script that just imports sys and prints out sys.argv if I ran it directly in cmd.exe as "script.py." If I ran it as "python script.py" then everything was good as usual. So I figured while sorting out what was wrong that I should try the latest 3.6 interpreter since it would be a safe bet.

Our organization finally lifted Sisyphus' rock over the 2.7 hump earlier in the year by moving to 3.6. So imagine my surprise when I found the latest 3.6 releases were just source tarballs. This left me with a dilemma and I'm still working through it. I haven't filed an issue about this because I haven't completed my own due diligence on the problem by trying it on a "latest."

For the sake of this particular problem, I think I can just use 3.8.3 for
exploration, but I'm worrying about my wider organization. I can't count on 3.8 because of some module dependencies our organization's software. 3.7 has a similar issue. So I figured I'd actually just build the thing and see what I can do.

I did manage to build it, but there was surprisingly a few quirks. I caused
some of it. For example, I didn't care about most of the externals before,
but I made sure to include them if I was create a release for others. A few
thousand people would be using this and I'm the one that would be
accountable if it went bust. So I made sure all the major externals were
incorporated, and a lot of those were messing up. Generally, the externals
would download, but some would not get moved/renamed to their final name,
and then the build would fail when trying to find them. So I wound up with
an installation that seemed to run my own code just fine in trials, but I
would be terrified to post into it our organization's software stack.

I'm now concerned about how long we have with 3.6 because people clearly
want us to move on even beyond that. I look online and the official support
window for it ends at the end of next year, but it looks like the real
support window for that on Windows has already ended. So our organization
may have miscalculated this. What does that mean if we managed to make it
to 3.8 in a few months? We can't do it right now due to a few missing
modules, but now we have to question if we'll only get a year out of 3.8
before we're doing this all over again.