As mentioned above, you can use Distutils configuration files to record personal or site preferences for any Distutils options. That is, any option to any command can be stored in one of two or three (depending on your platform) configuration files, which will be consulted before the command-line is parsed. This means that configuration files will override default values, and the command-line will in turn override configuration files. Furthermore, if multiple configuration files apply, values from "earlier" files are overridden by "later" files.