debian distutils site-wide configuration (distutils.cfg in /etc?)

[Corey Wright <undefined@pobox.com>]

prompted in part by the recent post about installing non-debianized python
modules, i am curious what is the "debian way" for configuring distutils
system-wide.

i want all non-debianized python modules/eggs to be installed
into /usr/local.  instead of having to append the proper args to every
setup.py and easy_install invocation, i want to create a system-wide
configuration file for distutils (similar to this [1], but system-wide).

the "python way" appears to be writing to ${prefix}/lib/python
${ver}/distutils/distutils.cfg [2]
(eg /usr/lib/python2.4/distutils/distutils.cfg), but that doesn't seem
appropriate in light of FHS and debian's handling of site.py (located
in /etc with a symlink in /usr/lib/pythonX.Y).

has debian's python installation been altered to search for distutils.cfg
in /etc?  i couldn't find anything relevant searching the web for "debian
distutils.cfg" and i'm not familiar enough with python's initialization to
know which source files to look at. if not, should debian's pythonX.Y
packages handle distutils.cfg the same as site.py (install an empty
distutils.cfg to /etc/pythonX.Y and create a symlink to it
in /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/distutils/)?

for now i've manually replicated debian's site.py handling for
distutils.cfg, but i wonder if this should be done by the debian python
package (manually editing/creating files in /usr, except for /usr/local,
always makes me nervous ;-).

[1] http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PackageNotes#on-debian
[2]
http://docs.python.org/inst/config-syntax.html#SECTION000510000000000000000

corey
-- 
undefined@pobox.com