[Distutils] subclassing commands in extensions

I've subclassed bdist_egg in my setup.py to add an option, "--include-docs", 'i'. It works as I expect it to when run from the command line while it's in the setup.py. Since I have a few projects that may use this, I thought I may try to put it in an extension. However, now when I run python setup.py bdist_egg -i, I get error: command 'bdist_egg' has no such option 'include_docs' Is there something extra that needs to be done when putting a subclassed command in an extension instead of just a setup.py? Thanks, -Chris