>> I wonder if it would be better to have distutils generate the >> appropriate type of makefile and execute that instead... Guido> But that doesn't work for platforms that don't have a Make. And Guido> while Windows has one, its file format is completely different, Guido> so you'd have to teach distutils how to write each platform's Guido> Makefile format. I don't see that writing different makefile formats is any harder than writing different shell commands. On those systems where you don't have a make-like tool, either distutils already writes compile and link commands or it doesn't work at all. On those systems where you do have a make-like facility, I see no reason to not use it. You will get more reliable dependency checking for one thing. Skip