Distutils is a standard python system for building and installing modules. The distutils class is used to automate the building of python modules that use the distutils system. Any python package that requires the standard python commands to build and install is using the distutils system and should be able to use this class:python setup.py build python setup.py install The distutils class will perform the build and install actions on the setup.py provided by the package, as required for building distutils packages, including setting all the required parameters for cross compiling. It willl also perform the following actions: Adds python-native to DEPENDS to ensure that python is built and installed on the build host. This also ensure that the version of python that is used during package creation matches the version of python that will be installed on the target. Adds python-core to RDEPENDS to ensure that the python-core is installed when this module is installed. Note that you need to manually add any other python module dependencies to RDEPENDS. The following example from the moin recipe shows how simple this can make a python package:DESCRIPTION = "A full fledged WikiWiki system written in Python" LICENSE = "GPL" SECTION = "base" PRIORITY = "optional" MAINTAINER = "Your name <yname@example.com>" PR = "r1" SRC_URI = "${SOURCEFORGE_MIRROR}/moin/moin-${PV}.tar.gz" inherit distutilsThe header, source location and the inherit are all that is required.