Hi. I have been lurking on the pypy list for a while, and I happened to see a message under the subject "bootstrapping issues" that caught my attention: There is the idea of not using make/configure/automake but a simple understandable debuggable (read: python based) build environment. It just so happens that I'm part of the team developing SCons, which is a 100% pure Python make replacement based on the winning proposal for the Software Carpentry Project build tool. It's very full-featured, and includes many features that have to be hand-rolled with the traditional make/configure/automake solution. For more information, see www.scons.org. Oh, and it's free as in both beer and speech, of course. -Charles P.S. I don't subscribe to the email list, I only check the archives every once in a while, so please copy any replies directly to my email. Thanks.