Hi, I'm playing lately with distutils (on the 2.7a branch). This "sudden" interest has been triggered by the python bugs: http://bugs.python.org/issue5941 http://bugs.python.org/issue5940 What I've found (IMHO) is the lack of proper logging while stepping through all the loops inside the code. In fact distutils.log (the log module used internally) It is loosely written resembling the logging python module but missing the full elegance in the api: is there any reason it could not be made very similar to it? I think this is one of the reason is not more deeply spread into the distutils package (a useful tool in diagnostic, IMHO). Because I'm out of work at the moment (It might not last forever tough) I can do it if there is any interest and send a patch set to be reviewed. Beside this to the people interested I can provide a binary compiled python version with the patches hosted on the suse build server system: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cavallo71:/python-opt/ This is totally system transparent so it can be installed and de-installed without impact on the host system. Let me know your toughts please, Antonio cavallo