I agree with all points except the last. With Windows you have the problem of multiple C runtimes - last time I checked the installer was unusable because the DLLs installed were linked against a different runtime than the one we link against. We would have to rebuild the DLLs ourselves. This would be a hassle and I don't think it's wise to make such a change this close to release.

Windows DLL joy. What are the runtime differences? I thought there was just the debug/release split. Or are there more? We don't have the same issue with everything else that is loaded into python? Or is python careful enough not to care?

My assumption is that you don't consider Solaris to be a "normal platform",

Indeed :-)

but building Boost libraries on Solaris is non-trivial too.

It looks like they have mostly worked that out <http://shoaibmir.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/building-boost-under-solaris/>

We can certainly look into it post-release though.