I don't think you should use just now (it is marked as experimental quick clearly :) ). As for the advantages: - support for arbitrary installation scheme, like autoconf (e.g. you don't have to hardcode installation path to install data as with distutils) - data files are easier to deal with - even though it is really raw, the internal tool to build C extensions has automatic dependency handling, md5-based coutent change detection, and supports parallel builds. - it is designed to be hackable. I want to be able to use scons or waf to build complex extensions (I am coming from numpy/scipy, which has particularly strong needs for building C extensions compared to the average python library)