> the problem is not Apple's in the sense that we enforce the use of the build compiler.
Well, yes, and this is a known limitation, so we could argue that Apple broke distutils.  But...

> Without a fix along this line would mean that essentially *every* user of python.org Pythons on
> the latest releases of OS X would have to ensure that the environment variable override is in
> place for every Distutils install of an extension module.  That strikes me as unacceptable.
> Distutils already does equally magical things.
Given that we did similar changes to support Debian multiarch instead of having people use environment variables, I change my position and support your patch.  (Comments on Rietveld.)