> Perhaps the patch could be accepted in distutils so that bdist_rpm 
> always runs setup with -O1? Or some other change that could make
> it easy to configure/customize distutils to match the platforms 
> needs ...

We could have a new parameter for bdist_rpm for this so it doesn't 
use sdist optimize parameter, (rpm_optimize) 
and make it True by default for example.

But is this a desired behavior for all rpm-based systems out there ?

> Tarek, I assume you meant you are creating a Fedora 10 
> or RHEL/CentOS 5 VM?

Yes, I am downloading Fedora 9. I assumed it was the best pick to 
work on that problem. (let me know if I should use another version)
 
> I will be glad to help testing and answering further questions

Great ! While I am going to work on Fedora 9 for this problem,
if you have the time to set up a python development 
environment, it would be great to test things on your side too.