Éric Araujo added the comment: Starting with Python 2.3, environment variables like CC (familiar to people compiling C projects on unix) are respected. That’s what I think should be added to the distutils docs, maybe in the reference doc for build_ext, or in the narrative doc talking about extension modules. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue763043> _______________________________________