I'm afraid not, at least not without breaking everyone who has hardcoded the paths already. And I'm pretty sure that include directory is never used anymore, either (at least not by distutils, and not by default).

The sysconfig module provides the programmatic interface to the directory structure - I'd suggest using "sysconfig.get_paths()" to find the locations where files may be written to.

I'd also suggest building your native C library to a wheel and then installing that into the virtual environment, as that's the supported way of adding files. In that case, there's other tooling for specifying the destination for particular files, and it all already takes into account the layout on different platforms.