Arfrever, your proposal is certainly one of many possible solutions and one that would be appropriate if we were designing the Python configure, Makefile, and Distutils components from scratch or looking at major changes to Distutils.  But we're not at this point.  We all know that Distutils is brittle and I think at this point in its life it is best to change as little as possible without really good reason.  For better or worse, most distributors and package maintainers have figured out how to make Distutils do what they need to do until the next generation of package building starts being addressed post-3.4.  The proposed patch solves a very specific problem with very little risk (IMO) to breaking anyone's current solutions.