Thanks!

> This patch was made against the hg.python.org/cpython repo.
This is good.  See http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/Contributing

> I'm not sure where I should add documentation about this new behavior.
At least in Doc/library/packaging.compiler.rst and Doc/packaging/setupcfg.rst, maybe in Doc/install too.

> This feature could probably use some unittests to be added as well.
Yes.  You can see how we use mocking in test_unixccompiler.py or test_util.py to test real-world program output and make sure our code parses it right.

> This doesn't seem right to me, as "--" is frequently found in options
> strings, and I'd expect it to cause problems.  If this is a bug in
> extra_compile_args, I'm happy to create a separate bug and submit a patch.
Please do.  I’ll look into the history to see whether there was a comment about that, but this really looks like a bug.  The separator should be something that can’t be part of options strings, like “;”.