bdist_rpm tries to deal with debuginfo packages by naming them in the source. Just as debuginfo packages are artifacts of a buildystem, one can modify the buildsystem to create various other rpms even though the spec file only creates one. The attached patch tries to approach the solution in a more general way, by looking at the spec file and extracting the names of rpms that are going to be generated. This patch has been posted at some point on the distutils-sig mailing list: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2004-June/003953.html I assumed it already made it in, apparently not.