Jeethu's Blog

These days, I’m mostly working on linux and I haven’t had to use the Microsoft dev tools for a long time. I’m using Vista on my new laptop. Yesterday, I had to install pycrypto from source on Windows. The only compiler I had was MinGW, which doesn’t quite cut it with distutils. I figured that I’d have an easier time with the free Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition compiler. Apparently, distutils on Python 2.5.2 doesn’t like this compiler either.
Here’s what I had to do to get distutils to work with it.
First, patch distutils.
File: C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\msvccompiler.py
One of the things I observed in this file was that if
the environment variables DISTUTILS_USE_SDK and MSSdk
are set and if distutils can find “cl.exe” in the system path, it assumes that everything is set up.
To quote from a comment in the source,

# Assume that the SDK set up everything alright; don’t try to be
# smarter

Find the method load_macros in the MacroExpander class.
Replace the following lines inside the try block

if version > 7.0:
     self.set_macro("FrameworkSDKDir", net, "sdkinstallrootv1.1")
else:
     self.set_macro("FrameworkSDKDir", net, "sdkinstallroot")</pre>

With:

if version > 7.09:
     pass
elif version > 7.0:
     self.set_macro("FrameworkSDKDir", net, "sdkinstallrootv1.1")
else:
     self.set_macro("FrameworkSDKDir", net, "sdkinstallroot")

Now launch a command prompt window and run the following commands.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat
SET DISTUTILS_USE_SDK=1
SET MSSdk=1

Now you can run “setup.py build” and it works just fine.
The compiler spits out a couple of warnings about the option ‘GX’ being deprecated, but thats just an innocuous warning.