I'm in the process of developing an automated solution to allow users to quickly set up a Windows box so that it can be used to compile Python extensions and build wheels. While it can obviously be used by Windows developers who want to quickly set up a box, my main target is Unix developers who want to provide wheels for Windows users.
To that end, I'd like to get an idea of what sort of access to Windows a typical Unix developer would have. I'm particularly interested in whether Windows XP/Vista is still in use, and whether you're likely to already have Python and/or any development tools installed. Ideally, a clean Windows 7 or later virtual machine is the best environment, but I don't know if it's reasonable to assume that. Another alternative is to have an Amazon EC2 AMI prebuilt, and users can just create an instance based on it. That seems pretty easy to do from my perspective but I don't know if the connectivity process (remote desktop) is a problem for Unix developers. Any feedback would be extremely useful. I'm at a point where I can pretty easily set up any of these options, but if they don't turn out to actually be usable by the target audience, it's a bit of a waste of time! :-) Thanks, Paul -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list