I've been using distutils as part of a larger automake-managed project.
One of the functions that automake provides is "make distcheck" which it
has been especially hard to get distutils to play along with. 

So I added a src-dir option to allow for passing src dir to the build.

Some other issues supersede this one ... and commits from Neil
Schemenauer resolve this issue may be only for me :).
Please see as example issue4151 .

Roumen's comments suggest that this should be closed.
Monty, do you disagree?

There's been no reply to msg109822, so should this be closed with the Superseder field updated or what?

I suspect so, but I leave it to Eric to decide.

#4151 and friends were about building Python, this is about building Python projects with distutils.  As a feature request, I’m reassigning to distutils2.

Monty: Would you like to update your patch?  distutils is frozen except for bug fixes, we work on the next gen in parallel.  See distutils2.notmyidea.org for developer resources and link to our repository.

Let me add that distutils very much wants you to run the setup script from its parent directory, contrary to autotools which can run from another directory, so it could be that other parts than build* commands are affected.

That said, specifying the target build dir is supported; in other words, don’t run “../setup.py build --src-dir=..” but try “./setup.py build --build-dir some/where”.

I still have to do a bit of research about make distclean.  Some options like build_ext.inplace are not affected by build-dir, so distclean is not as easy as “rm -rf $build_dir”.