Currently distutils builds files in a temporary directory named 'build' in current dir if not specified otherwise. It will be pythonic to name this directory to be __build__ be default to distinguish it from project specific directories and clarify that this one can be safely removed (much like __pycache__).

I see no reason to make this change.  'build' is pretty much universally understood to be something that can be blown away, and I think that making Python's naming convention different than that used by other open source software projects in similar contexts would be much more confusing than helpful.

RDM> 'build' is pretty much universally understood to be something that can be blown away

That's not true anymore in 2012. Why follow the bad practice?

I also want to know what open source software project are you referring to. From my experience 'build' directory name is an ancient legacy from Unix C compilers of previous century. Java doesn't use it, MSVC never did it, CMake doesn't have it, Go seems to build everything in temp dir.

Another difference from C sources that it is very convenient to use Python packages directly from source. In this case this unrelated 'build' dir will be the source of confusion if user previously tried to install the package.

The bug tracker is the wrong place to discuss your proposal. Please join the distutils-sig [1]. The group coordinates all efforts.

[1] http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/distutils-sig/

Ronald Oussoren on the mailing list:

If the name of the build directory bothers you you can change it by adding two lines to ~/.pydistutils.cfg:

[build]
build-base = __build__


Agreed, closing.

That's not an argument. I am asking about it in general.

Another wart of Python.