[Distutils] How to easy_install from source package with mingw32 on Windows?

[zooko]

Folks:

Thank you for the various Python packaging tools!

I just published a new version of a Free Software package:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/zfec

And I tested it with "easy_install zfec" on Windows XP, and I was  
disappointed to see this error message:

"""
error: Setup script exited with error: Python was built with version  
7.1 of Visual Studio, and extensions need to be built with the same  
version of the compiler, but it isn't installed.
"""

If I download the zfec source tarball and execute

"""
./setup.py install
"""

Then I get the same error message, but if I execute

"""
./setup.py build -c mingw32 install
"""

Then it successfully builds and installs.

(This is on Python 2.4 -- I believe that in Python 2.5 that error  
message has been updated to mention that mingw is an option.)

So my first question is: how can I configure the zfec source package  
so that someone who has mingw installed and who runs "easy_install  
zfec" successfully builds it?

A deeper question is: wouldn't it be nice if "./setup.py install"  
automatically used the "build -c mingw32" feature when necessary?   
Would anyone be interested in extending distutils to do that?

Regards,

Zooko