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mingw-runtime 3.10 (released a few days ago) supports
msvcr80. Python (distutils) would need a patch to supply the
necessary flags when it detects that python.exe is using
msvcr80 (that's non-trivial, as you need to know, and
hard-code, the MSVC compiler version numbers :-(). As we're
in feature-freeze for Python 2.5, this won't happen until
2.6, but I am happy to make a patch for 2.6 to support
msvcr80 in distutils (assuming someone lets me know the
relevant MSVC build numbers when I need them).

By the way, this thread is irrelevant to the actual patch,
which is merely a doc patch...