Comment 7 for bug 345998

So it seems that doing:
$ cat Python26/Lib/distutils/*.cfg
[build]
compiler = mingw32

Was sufficient to tell it to use mingw32 to build the python installer. (Without that it tried to use VS9 which might have worked, but would have required setting up zlib headers, etc. Might still try it that way).

Anyway, see:
https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~jameinel/bzr/jam-integration/+merge/7626

Which I used to build the 2.6 installers for bzr-1.16