building rpms with distutils

[Jeremy Sanders]

I've searched in vain for ages on the web about this problem. I'm trying
to generate an rpm for the "numarray" python package. The catch is the
system is a RedHat 7.3 system, so I need to use the python2 executable
(the package is python-2 only, and I don't write python-1 code) rather
than the ancient python executable.

Obviously
 python ./setup.py bdist_rpm
fails, but so does
 python2 ./setup.py bdist_rpm
when it tries to build the rpm. The spec file generated mentions the
"python" executable rather than "python2", so rpm tries to run setup.py
with python rather than python2.

Is there an easy way to fix this (other than updating my distribution)?

Thanks

Jeremy