The Python Distutils are one of the nicer features about Python, as they allow one to build, install, and distribute Python modules.

I'm in the process of trying to build RH9/FC1/FC2 RPMs using the distutils for the PyOpenGL module, and am having problems.

First, the distutils builds more than one version of the RPM file (a debug version and a non-debug version), and then dies on a simple AssertionError when it finds more than one version. As seen here, the distutils mailing list has known about this for over a year, and I don't know why it hasn't been fixed. Obviously, one can simply hack bdist_rpm.py, but I don't want to do this, in part because I want to be able to make sure that people who use my software can install/upgrade things without hacking their python installation.

Secondly, when calling bdist_rpm, one is supposed to be able to pass in --python=whatever arguments to specify which version of Python one is building the RPM for. This doesn't seem to work, and, additionally, seems to kill other options.