distutils question

[Toby J Sargeant]

Is there any way to add to the command line arguments that a distutils
aware package understands? i went down this route:

class my_build(build):
   user_options=build.user_options+[
      ('freetype-dir=',None,"root directory of freetype install")
      ]

and failed dismally -- the new argument shows up in the --help list, but
doesn't seem to be included in the information passed to getopt.

more geenerally, what's the preferred way of adding user specified paths
for includes and libraries?

thanks,

toby.