Complain about missing VS 2003 in the error message

of msvccompiler, and mention Cygwin as an alternative.
Fixes #1257728.

diff --git a/Lib/distutils/msvccompiler.py b/Lib/distutils/msvccompiler.py
index 46e2cd31af384f3f9144f05ce69bf4f08afb4ecd..8ed987e5188e81757fc9bb0008300fcf41c1f88d 100644 (file)
--- a/Lib/distutils/msvccompiler.py
+++ b/Lib/distutils/msvccompiler.py
@@ -131,8 +131,10 @@ class MacroExpander:
                 self.set_macro("FrameworkSDKDir", net, "sdkinstallroot")
         except KeyError, exc: #
             raise DistutilsPlatformError, \
-                  ("The .NET Framework SDK needs to be installed before "
-                   "building extensions for Python.")
+                  ("""Python was built with Visual Studio 2003;
+extensions must be built with a compiler than can generate compatible binaries.
+Visual Studio 2003 was not found on this system. If you have Cygwin installed,
+you can try compiling with MingW32, by passing "-c mingw32" to setup.py.""")
 
         p = r"Software\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\Product"
         for base in HKEYS:

diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 82872a8ff11aefde5c4e6770156ceb94fb7cd66a..87bc4a3e774f571a556b4f5c7e5b07cefdc46408 100644 (file)
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -67,6 +67,9 @@ Extension Modules
 Library
 -------
 
+- Bug #1257728: Complain about missing VS 2003 in the error message
+  of msvccompiler, and mention Cygwin as an alternative.
+
 - Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly
   refers to file descriptors, not file objects.