Hello, This is a side discussion but quiet important ihmo. == Problem == Some people complained about the fact that is was hard to extend Distutils commands. You end up rewriting the whole command most of the time. So what's a command ? It's a class that is used by the distribution instance when you run Distutils. roughly: cmd = Command(distribution) cmd.initialize_options() cmd.finalize_options() <--- allows to check the options if subcommands where run cmd.run() <--- runs the code each command can define sub commands, but most of the time it's a harcoded list, so you need to inherit the command if you want to add a new behavior. == work in progress, == What we want to do here is being able to define subsets in run(), sharing the same options environment. so basically, a rough, generic run() method could be: def run(): for func in some_funcs: func(self, options) If "some_funcs" could be defined by a registery with simple names, anyone could provide new functions and configure the registery to run a sequence of function. Given a command name, Distutils can get this list of function, through a registery. Each function could register itself into Distutils, like in what I have started to work here for the manifest file: see http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem The ordering would be configurable through the setup.cfg file. Any opinion, idea for this part ? Cheers Tarek