Hi All, I must admit that my perspective of distutils is from a system administrators perspective. Not a package developer. Maybe I write code sometimes that I want to ship out.. like a package mangager.. haha.. anyway.. My general comments for distutils are: - introduce gui tools to help developers "build" - introduce gui tools to help users "manage" - improve support of distutils on the windows platform so that it looks like it was developed after the game space invaders and not before. - talk to other "stars" in the python universe ie py2exe wxpython, pip.. installers.. ie NSIS etc etc.. - improve package consistency - write more tests After spending a few months on this list I now recognise that many people have dedicated an enormous amount of time effort, skill and commitment. In summary I'm suggesting that we breath some new life into distutils... David ps: my pet hate is windows installers for packages. I want these to go away. I don't like running executables to install a package.