The distutils.command.config module reads:

    def _gen_temp_sourcefile(self, body, headers, lang):
        filename = "_configtest" + LANG_EXT[lang]

which means that every time one of the functions is used, a temporary file with the same name will be created. This is really fragile and fails terribly whenever more than one process tries to use the relevant functions in the same working directory.

I believe this code should use the tempfile module to generate unique temporary files names instead.

Thanks for the report.  Did you find this by looking at the code or while using distutils?  In other words, if this is just a theoretical issue / code quality problem, it won’t be changed.  (distutils is not improved anymore.)

While using. We run parallel merges with out-of-source builds in Gentoo, and I found this to result in a failure when building the 'egenix-mx-base' package [1] which uses the 'config' command.

[1]:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/egenix-mx-base

Can I open a PR for it?

Distutils is now deprecated (see PEP 632) and all tagged issues are being closed. From now until removal, only release blocking issues will be considered for distutils.

If this issue does not relate to distutils, please remove the component and reopen it. If you believe it still requires a fix, most likely the issue should be re-reported at https://github.com/pypa/setuptools