Thanks to Jeremy Hylton for sending this my way: looks like the Tcl crowd have also realized that a standard way to build and distribute extensions is a Good Thing. See:

http://www.scriptics.com/tea-summit/index.html

One more fire under the collective bottom of the Distutils SIG (which is NOT dead, it just smells funny). Stay tuned for impending developments. Or subscribe to distutils-checkins; with luck there will be a flurry of activity there in the next week or so:

http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-checkins

Greg