@Mark I don't quite understand what you're saying. Distutils supports it, provided you add a line to distutils.cfg. I've been using the PythonXY versions of Python with MinGW (everything before 2.7.9.0) to happily compile for nearly 4 years now.

Regarding your earlier suggestion about distutils and Visual C++ for Python, I hacked something together to do it dynamically in the script using distutils. Very ugly :-)

import platform
if platform.system() == 'Windows':
    vcpath = os.environ['ProgramFiles']
    vcpath = os.path.join(vcpath, 'Common Files', 'Microsoft',
        'Visual C++ for Python', '9.0', 'vcvarsall.bat')
    if os.path.isfile(vcpath):
        import distutils.msvc9compiler
        old_find = distutils.msvc9compiler.find_vcvarsall
        def new_find(version):
            path = old_find(version)
            if path is None:
                return vcpath
        distutils.msvc9compiler.find_vcvarsall = new_find