Thorsten Behrens said:
> You are right, this is not a bug in Python. The diff provides a
> workaround for a limitation in VC++ 2008 Express. This diff is a
> piece of user service.

ipatrol added:
> Purity shmurity. The point of distutils is largely to present a
> unified and simple interface. 'python setup.py install' should be all
> a user has to do on any platform. Unless you can come up with a
> better idea, MSVC is really the only big compiler on Windows.

The feature freeze is distutils is not a conspiracy plotted by developers loving purity; it is a necessity caused by hard pragmatism.  Tarek would have loved to continue improving distutils instead of forking distutils2, but he could not because third-party code relying on bugs and workarounds was broken.  We have to be cautious, and it has nothing to do with purity.  Believe me, the freeze, fork and merge was not something fun for distutils developers, but we had to do it precisely for our users.

While I agree that in an ideal world, “'python setup.py install' should be all a user has to do on any platform”, it cannot be done in distutils.  Like Martin said:
> if you want to use SDK tools, you are supposed to set
> DISTUTILS_USE_SDK, after opening the respective build environment

For distutils2/packaging however, we can work on improving the compiler system, so that “pysetup run install” is all a user had to do on any platform.  See #12257 for that.