I would like to be able to use distutils to compile a shared library with a different set of exported symbols than the default.

In Windows, distutils only exports certain symbols needed for the Python module initialization API when it compiles a shared module. It does this by passing a file to the C compiler that lists those symbols. In Linux all symbols are exported/visible by default because that's just how the linker has traditionally worked.

I would like to be able to override or augment this list of symbols. Probably by just providing my own 'symbols to export' file.

distutils is definitely the poor man's compiler frontend but this feature would make it easier for me to support Windows (Python's secret shame.)