Another problem we've been struggling with for Zope projects is that distutils really only installs Python modules and extensions. It's support for data files and C header files is pretty limited. We've got problems with each that could probably be solved in distutils. We often store data files in a package directory. Zope components sometimes have configuration files, presentation files like html and images, and other data. One common case is unit test packages, which often have test data in them. In all these cases, we find it useful to access the data files by loading them from the package directory. You get the package's __path__ attribute and look for data files in that directory. The problem is that distutils won't install these files for us. It ends up being a lot of work to get the files installed. You need to provide a custom distclass to copy the files at build and install time. It would be a lot more convenient if distutils would just install the files by default. I think there are some potential problems with installing non .py files. You need to have some control over what exactly gets built and installed, so that you don't install .py~ files. One possibility is to explicitly list the file extensions that constitute installable data. We did that for Zope3, but the list of extensions ended up being fairly long. The other problem we have is with header files. We'd like to have .h files that are installed inside a directory in /usr/local/include. For example, we'd like source code that uses the persistence API to read like this: #include "persistence/persistence.h" #include "persistence/persistenceAPI.h" I can't figure out any way to instruct distutils to create a persistence directory and put the headers in it. I think we'd need to extend the specification for header files to make this possible. Jeremy