When running the command install_lib, the command build_clib is not run.
If a package contains clibs they can be dependencies for extension libs,
at least that is stated in the module docstring of build_clib.

In real life you can see it when trying to run the command install_lib
on the current reportlab2.3.

The patch provided needs do be applied in the distutils dir directly with

patch install_lib.py dependency.patch

As requested, I asked on the mailing list first, whether this really is
a bug. 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-February/010974.html

I am half finished writing a test case, that I'll append to this ticket
later.