>Terry J. Reedy added the comment:
>
>One must run external.bat if one is to subsequently build from the vs
>gui with *most* of the external dependencies. I think the command to
>run it should be 'external', not 'ready'. 'External' means get the
>external dependencies and anyone who has run external.bat will know
>what it means. 'Ready' does not mean anything in particular.

Fair point. Thinking about it again after some sleep, I agree. Next version will revert to 'external' rather than 'ready'.

>Just curious:
>Why do the buildbots run make clean before re-compiling? I seems like
>lots of extra work to re-compile things that are up to date?

I think the idea is to make sure everything is fresh, and avoid phantom problems from things that shouldn't cause problems, but do.

>What does running 'kill-python before re-building python do? I have not
>seen it mentioned in the in the devguide or pcbuild/readme.

I believe it's what actually performs the cleaning process. Tools/buildbot/clean.bat builds kill_python.exe and then runs it.