Here is a list of things I've found while playing with the 0.9.2 snapshot.
I've also posted this to Greg directly, but on second thought I think it might be worthwhile getting some feedback from distutilers as well:
* distutils doesn't seem to like diretory names in MANIFEST
* the setup.py file itself is not included in the source distribution per default (why not ?)
* bdist_wininst wants zlib but the installer has a note that it is not using it anymore
* bdist_wininst fails with a setup.py file which does not define long_description
* bdist_rpm fails with an error in the rpm command (the source rpm is built, but it fails to build to the binary rpm for some reason -- it says, that it can't find the file ??); do I need some new rpm release for this to work ?
* the bdist commands don't compile the .py files into .pyo but this is needed in order to use them with python -O
* bdist (the dumb version) defaults to creating a tar.gz archive which is relative to / -- it shouldn't use the usr/local/ prefix to make the installation relocateable (e.g. to install under /usr, /opt, /opt/local, etc.)
* how can I define the compiler settings for extension compilation (it defaults to -m486 for RPMs -- -mcpu=pentium would be more appropriate; default for standard bdist seems to be -O2 and no architecture) ?
And a general question: how can I define which files are documentation, examples and auxiliary files ?
More to come :-)