Éric, no, the problem is not Apple's in the sense that we enforce the use of the build compiler.  Without a fix along this line would mean that essentially *every* user of python.org Pythons on the latest releases of OS X would have to ensure that the environment variable override is in place for every Distutils install of an extension module.  That strikes me as unacceptable.  Distutils already does equally magical things.  I think this is the best solution at the moment.  Ronald, what's your opinion?