However, I think people ask much too often for a debugging build; in many cases, they could work happily with a release build that supports debugging. Depending on the problem you try to solve, you may or may not need debug information for pythonxy.dll as well, or just for your extension module.
While that is true in theory, I often find it is not the case in practice, generally due to the optimizer. Depending on what magic the compiler has done, it can be very difficult to set breakpoints (conditional or otherwise), inspect variable values, etc. It is useful in some cases, but very often I find myself falling back to a debug build after attempting to debug a local release build.
I think there are several other cases in distutils to support special cases (e.g. the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK environment variable); if people want to see their setup supported, AND ARE WILLING TO CONTRIBUTE: more power to them.
Yes, but I believe its also important to solicit feedback on the best way to achieve their aims. In this particular case, I believe it would have been misguided for me to simply check in whatever was necessary to have distutils work from the PCBuild8 directory. I hope it is clear that I am willing to contribute the outcome of these discussions... Cheers, Mark