[Distutils] how to build location-independent bdist packages on OS X?

[Bill Janssen]

I'm trying to bundle up a Python package with a C extension in it for
Python 2.6 on an OS X 10.6 system.  I don't want to install it in the
normal /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/ location.

But when I try "python setup.py bdist", it builds a tar file with the
prefix /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages as a prefix to each file.  I
then tried "python setup.py bdist_dumb" with the same result.  I then
tried "python setup.py bdist --prefix=.", but "--prefix" isn't
recognized by bdist.

What's the appropriate magic here?

Oh, and I don't want to have to use setuptools.

TIA,

Bill