howto check programs and C libraries

[David Palao]

Hello,
I'm in charge of preparing a computer room for the practices of
"introduction to programming".
One of the tasks is checking that from all the computers in the room
one can execute some programs and link (and compile) against some
libraries.
My first idea was using Autotools (or cmake), but as I'm a big fan of
python, I was thinking how to do that with python, and I don't have a
clear solution yet.
I know that distutils includes the distutils.command.config module,
and I think it could do the job (when properly subclassed).
Do you have a better idea?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,

DPalao