[Great analysis, Tim!]
4) The audience is Python end-users "in general", and the product is pure Python. I think this is the most important one for Distutils to address, and compilation isn't a part of it. So far, though, what Gordon is doing seems more appropriate than what Distutils has been up to. I hope his work gets folded into this.
I'm not sure what stuff by which Gordon you're referring to. I am only familiar with his installer, which I thought is win32 only (but I may be mistaken) and is an installer for a whole application, not just a bunch of modules. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But this reminds me of a different issue, which Jim Ahlstrom has been hammering about before: there's a completely separate set of cases where what you are distributing is a stand-alone application, and the target consists of end users who are entirely uninterested in whether it's written in Python, C or Elvish. (And then there's still the distinction between Win32, Unix or both.) The current distutil dools don't deal with this at all. I think it should though, and I think its framework is powerful enough to be able to add this, e.g. as a new "appdist" command. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)