> but the very very first thing that has to happen - before any of this
> work is begun - is for the distutils freeze to be lifted, or for 
> someone to come up with a _sensible_ alternative solution.

Tarek's approach looks right to me: mingw32 support in distutils should take the form of an external module that subclasses (when possible) or monkeypatches (on last resort) the standard distutils behavior.

The current patch makes too many changes in core distutils functions; it cannot be accepted in this form.  I'm sure that most of the needed changes can be made in a subclass of the present Mingw32CCompiler.