After much trial and tribulation with Pyhton's distutils and setuptools, I decided it wasn't really appropriate to be building a C library with the Python tools. While the capability exists in distutils, it's pretty obvious that it suffers from some pretty substantial code rot.
So, I've gone the autoconf route. I didn't really want to, but really there's no better solution that I can find that doesn't involve setting PureDocs aside while I start yet another project.
In any case, the autoconf'ing isn't complete, and it doesn't quite work, but I've committed what I have so far. Once I get it all working well on multiple platforms, I'll finish off the C API. Then Kate should be able to add some C-based plugins using the SID parser generator.