Excuse me for hijacking this thread and asking, but how hard is it to compile programs in Windows? 'Cause in Linux you just type:
./ configure && make && make install
and you're set to go after you settle dependency problems, which I found overwhelmingly easy the last time I tried it in PCLinuxOS. And since you compile everything in Gentoo Linux anyway, it was as easy as typing:
emerge pygame
and dependencies and everything were grabbed for me.
so what do Windows users go through to compile stuff? I don't think it would be worth complaining this much about it...
As Luke pointed out, Python extensions have to be compiled with the same compiler as the main Python DLL, which in case of the official win32 distribution is VS.NET. It's relatively simple if you have the commercial version of Visual Studio, but scraping a compatible environment out of the freely available parts is a major hassle. There's also no tool for automatically getting the dependencies, so we Windows users have to hunt precompiled binaries with Google or try to compile them ourselves, which is usually a bit complicated because the Makefiles are designed for gcc and gnu make and are not compatible with the VS tools.
So basically, almost every Windows pythonista who hasn't bought the latest Visual Studio is on the mercy of precompiled binary installers for Python extensions. Unfortunate but true.
-- Sami Hangaslammi