again re 1.6b1 on Windows

[Alex Martelli]

As per my previous message -- as 1.6b1 seems to be released
only in source form (no Windows installer), I got it and built it
on Windows (with VC++6 SP4).  It built fine (as far as I could
see) and I already reported on the issue with installing (found no
way to install automatically -- maybe I just haven't been looking
in the right places?) and testing.

Now I turned to examine each sub-project.  Some I had
disabled, as specified in the instructions, as they needed
other stuff to be gotten separately -- tkinter, zlib, and
bsddb.

It appears that pyexpat is also in that category -- it won't
build unless you feed it a header file and a couple libs (the
expat core itself, I guess?).  No problem, as it happens I
had them lying around (as part of my Perl site\lib, which I
have not uninstalled yet), and pyexpat built fine with those.

I guess this is a bug of some sort but I'm not sure how to
categorize it.  Build/Platform-dependent I guess; but I dunno
if it's just something that should be documented, just as for
the other modules needing external files, or rather it's a bug
that those files are missing.  Oh well, not a biggie.

zlib built fine, anyway, although it expects the .lib file in a
place I'd never have guessed (and it seems to want the
static one rather than the DLL one? funny...).

Still, now I'm going to try and test pyexpat and zlib, and
we'll see.  Then bsddb, finally tkinter.  I still do wonder
about how to install it all -- I can gather from the 1.5.2 I
still have roughly where things do go, but manual edits of
the registry don't seem a nice thing to do.  We'll see...


Alex