I just "cvs up"d my Python tree and executed "make".
Nothing much changed, except patchlevel.h.  Make got
this right and rebuilt everything (patchlevel.h is
included from Python.h, so changing patchlevel.h
should cause make to rebuild just about everything).

Distutils failed to notice this, however, so it didn't rebuild any modules.  In this case, I think the
failure to rebuild is probably innocuous, but I'm
not at all confident it will do the right thing if I
modify some other file.  For example, I've noticed
that it's not sufficient to delete a module's .o file
when you want to rebuild it.  Distutils still thinks
the .so file is okay.

If distutils is going to take the place of make I
think it's going to need to do a much better job
deducing file dependencies or provide a robust
way for a person to tell it what those dependencies
are.