Tarek, the .compiler attribute is needed by bdist_ext, so cannot just be
removed or renamed to .compiler_obj. There's a lot of bdist_ext
distutils code out there relying on having the .compiler object available.

A much better fix would be to map the option to a new attribute in
build_ext, e.g. .compiler_name or to remove the option altogether and
always inherit the setting from the global dist option --compiler.

In general, when making such changes, please test these against a few
well-known packages such as twisted, pycrypto or egenix-mx-base which do
include C extensions.

Thanks.