[Sidnei da Silva]
Just noticed a checkin talking about the Windows Installer builder. I hope to find some time soon to take a look at that, since we now require Python 2.4 and Python 2.4 uses the 'Microsoft Installer'. I recall talking with Mark about it and he said it would take some time to fix the build process.
I just asked Andreas (off-list) what his Windows plans were for 2.9 -- for various reasons I assumed someone else was already looking at this, but that assumption may be wrong (and given the lack of relevant checkins recently, almost certainly wrong <frown>). WRT Python 2.4, I never found a sane way to just _extract_ files from an .msi installer, so that part of the build process is dead meat now. In other "bundle everything" Windows installers at Zope Corp (such as for ZRS), I copy Python .pyd. .dll and .exe files from my own Python 2.4.2 installation instead. These binary files are all the build-Zope-installer process really needs from the Python Windows installer; the rest (like .py and .h files) can be taken from a Python tarball. You can avoid wrestling with .msi entirely this way. Possible headache: Python 2.4.2 requires msvcr71.dll, which is a Microsoft DLL (it's akin to msvcrt.dll for Visual Studio 6 -- it's the C runtime for VC 7.1), and one for which the redistribution conditions are unclear (at least to me). You can't assume that all Windows boxes already have this DLL. Another: I have no idea how the new zpkg-based build process will work with a Zope2-style installer. A Zope3-style installer is different in many ways (it's a "plain" distutils-based installer, and requires that the end user get and install Python & pywin32 first). Plan on pain-time here.