Dumb question, but why is distutils wrapping the command args in quotes
anyway? I'm not even sure why lists are being used (rather than a
string) for the options, except that lists are a bit more "Pythony" and
can be used to semantically divide the options from each other. If you
end up having to use separate list elements for the option flag and the
value it takes, doesn't that indicate that the list isn't being used
properly?