defaults to 'dist' (ie. no longer in the distribution root).

This'll work fine with 2.0 or 1.5.2, but is less than ideal for
1.6a1/a2.  But the code to accomodate 1.6a1/a2 was released with
Distutils 0.9, so it can go away now.

misc/install.c, still needs to be updated, and it looks like a non-trivial
change.

otherwise just generate an '/export:' option.

fail do we try for win32api/win32con.  If *those* both fail, then we don't
have registry access.  Phew!

More reformatting by me.
Also added some editorial comments.

we can run "sdist" on a distribution with old-style extension structures
even if we haven't built it yet.  Bug spotted by Harry Gebel.

Changed 'prune_file_list()' so it also prunes out RCS and CVS directories.
Added 'is_regex' parameter to 'select_pattern()', 'exclude_pattern()',
  and 'translate_pattern()', so that you don't have to be constrained
  by the simple shell-glob-like pattern language, and can escape into
  full-blown regexes when needed.  Currently this is only available
  in code -- it's not exposed in the manifest template mini-language.
Added 'prune' option (controlled by --prune and --no-prune) to determine
  whether we call 'prune_file_list()' or not -- it's true by default.
Fixed 'negative_opt' -- it was misnamed and not being seen by dist.py.
Added --no-defaults to the option table, so it's seen by FancyGetopt.

'link_shared_object()'.

methods (but not 'link_executable()', hmmm).  Currently only used by
BCPPCompiler; it's a dummy parameter for UnixCCompiler and MSVCCompiler.

Also added 'bcpp' to compiler table used by 'new_compiler()'.

Two major points:
  * lots of overlap with MSVCCompiler; the common code really should be
    factored out into a base class, say WindowsCCompiler
  * it doesn't work: weird problem spawning the linker (see comment for
    details)

  command objects.
Various formatting tweaks, typo fixes in comments.

Ditched my old code that fixed relative paths in the Makefile -- didn't work,
  doomed to failure, etc.

the 'implib_dir' attribute is back (only on NT, of course).

Also supposedly made some change to where .lib files wind up under MSVC++,
  but I don't understand how to code is doing what Thomas says it's
  doing.

Added 'check_lib()', which provides a subset of the functionality of
  'check_func()' with a simpler interface and implementation.

doesn't blow up.  We don't currently use the 'set_executables()' bureaucracy,
although it would be nice to do so for consistency with UnixCCompiler.

Ensure that 'extra_args' (whether compile or link args) is never None.

to 'msvc_prelink_hack()', adding the parameters that it actually needs,
and only calling it for MSVC compiler objects.  Generally gave up on the
idea of a general "hook" mechanism: deleted the empty 'precompile_hook()'.

  experimental and untested.)
Call 'customize_compiler()' after getting CCompiler object.

information about building Python extensions that we discovered in
Python's makefile.  Currently only needed on Unix, so does nothing on
other systems.

that a particular compiler system depends on.  This consists of the
'set_executables()' and 'set_executable()' methods, and a few lines in
the constructor that expect implementation classes to provide an
'executables' attribute, which we use to initialize several instance
attributes.  The default implementation is somewhat biased in favour of
a Unix/DOS "command-line" view of the world, but it shouldn't be too
hard to override this for operating systems with a more sophisticated
way of representing programs-to-execute.

meant playing along with the new "dictionary of executables" scheme
added to CCompiler by adding the 'executables' class attribute, and
changing all the compile/link/etc. methods to use the new attributes
(which encapsulate both the program to run and its standard arguments,
so it was a *little* bit more than just changing some names).

Unix shell-like syntax (eg. in Python's Makefile, for one thing -- now that
I have this function, I'll probably allow quoted strings in config files too.

Fixed a few comments.

Tweaked help text.

the "install_data" command to the installation base, which is usually just
sys.prefix.  (Any setup scripts out there that specify data files will have
to set the installation directory, relative to the base, explicitly.)

on if it sees a filename with unknown extension.

in the module of the command classes that have command-specific
help options.  This lets us keep the principle of lazily importing
the ccompiler module, and also gets away from defining non-methods
at class level.