I have a working configure command at http://bitbucket.org/Merwok/distutils2-configure which works. (Read my short reports on https://wokslog.wordpress.com/ for more details.) It’s not completely finished, though:

1) I import build and install to get their user_options, to avoid duplicating these lines. Is that bad?

2) Test coverage is not exhaustive. This will be done incrementally.

3) I tried directly using Distribution and configure objects in the tests, but couldn’t get them to work; I temporarily settled for running Python (sys.executable) in a subprocess. I’m looking for help to change that.

4) As it is now, the configure command just records options without checking for conflicts (e.g. using both –prefix and –user for install). While not in the original description of the task, I think that it should be added. Prior art like 4Suite’s config command or a prototype for configure done by Tarek that I discovered only today support this idea. Is that okay? I’ll have to avoid code duplication between configure, build and install.