Discovering and using setup.py options

[Ryan Schmidt]

For Python projects that build using a setup.py file, how do I discover what options are available -- what's the equivalent of "./configure --help"? I've tried "python2.7 setup.py --help" and "python2.7 setup.py build --help" which seem to provide only generic help and not help specific to this setup.py file.

Once I know what options are available, how do I provide them to setup.py? I've tried adding them to build.args, which gives me an "option not recognized" error.

I've tried a couple times in recent days, with setup.py files that, based on my reading of them, provide some custom options that I would like to use, but I can't figure out how to use them. Can anyone help?