Lots of distribution formats need a place to put files that aren't really temporary, can often be generated by the Distutils, but may be tweaked by the developer (and put under source control). I'm thinking of RPM's spec files, Debian's directory of package meta-data, Wise scripts, and similar stuff. Seems like a good idea to me to put this all in a directory "dist": the first time you use the Distutils to generate a .spec file, or a Wise script, or what-have-you, it would create "dist" and would always put those sort of files in there. Naturally, this would be a configurable option to the bdist_* commands, but "dist" strikes me as a sensible default. This is distinct from the "build" directory for two reasons: 1) it's for distribution, not building -- hence the domain of the module developer rather than the installer/packager; 2) it's not temporary -- it's always safe to blow away the "build" directory, but could be foolish to ditch "dist". (Eg. if someone has started with Distutils-generated files and customized them to suit.) In addition to the bdist_* commands, the sdist command could possibly use the dist tree for creating source archives. (Currently, it creates <distname>-<version> (eg. "Distutils-0.8.3") in the distribution root, fill it up with copies or hardlinks to all the files in MANIFEST, and creates an archive rooted at <distname>-<version>. If we move that source distribution tree down a level, we'd have to chdir to create the source archive.) Opinions? Sound like a good idea or just more complexity? Greg -- Greg Ward - nerd gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ When the ship lifts, all bills are paid. No regrets.