This is my first use of the distutils package, so I accept that I might have gone about things the wrong way. Initially for my freetype 2 extension module, I used autoconf to build a Setup.in file for building the module. I decided to switch to using distutils recently, and in doing so wanted to still be able to provide the --freetype-path and --with-pil-headers options to deal with different install locations for freetype and PIL. After a lot of poking around and many false starts, it seemed that there wasn't a good way to handle command line arguments that didn't involve extensive poking around in internal distutils objects. Eventually I gave up and just used the following code: handle={ '--freetype-path=' : optFreetypePath, '--with-pil-headers=' : optPilHeaders } arg=1 while arg<len(sys.argv): for k,v in handle.items(): if sys.argv[arg][:len(k)]==k: if v is not None: v(sys.argv[arg][len(k):]) del sys.argv[arg] break else: arg=arg+1 which seems like a rather large hack to me. What's the preferred distutils approach? Additionally, I noticed that the Extension object takes a runtime_library_path option, but the unixcompiler object spits out a -R/my/path option, which gcc doesn't like. Using extra_link_args seems like a sure way to tie yourself down to one compiler, though, so I'm not sure what I can do in this case. Toby. -- [ Toby Sargeant : Inpharmatica : Developer : t.sargeant@inpharmatica.co.uk ] [ http://www.inpharmatica.co.uk : 020 7074 4600 fax 020 7631 4844 ]