It has just occurred to me that those pragmas are awfully handy things, but can we rely on them?
In my experience, we can rely on them more than users specifying the correct libraries! Particularly with version changes, and debug/release builds. This may or may not be relevant to distutils. Also, any .libs specified on the command line will be searched before onces specified by the pragmas - meaning the command line effectively overrides it.
What if someone wants to build Python extensions with the Windows port of gcc, or with Borland's newly free-as-in-free-beer compiler? (I imagine they'll have a big job, as they'll probably have to start with building Python itself with said compiler. But this might be yet another little problem along that road.)
If they dont support the pragma (which I bet they will), then it is simply #ifdef'd around an MS specific variable. I think this would be the least of their problems! Mark.