That's bull, Eric. This is not about a corner case in cygwin. This is about mingw, which is the **main free software that builds executables on Windows**. You know, for when you don't want to require your users to install Visual Studio.

Additionally, both you and Matthias imposed artificial conditions that made it unlikely for patches to be created (search for "will insist").

Now, I have to agree that the larger python community (and not an under-resourced team like your good selves) should be involved in distutils (or choose and **support** a different package manager). But I'm not sure where I could file a bug for that (again, blogging may be the best choice).