Suggestion/question about depth buffer

Hi.
Recently I’m doing some kind of 2D rendering engine of my own that is able to render an isometric 3d scene using OpenGL ability to write to depth buffer.
The problem is that I can’t find an easy way to read z-buffer from a rendered image in Blender from a Python script.
So my question is, how can I obtain this values, probably without exporting to an intermediate format like exf in order to save the z data.

If there is no way to do it, I would like to suggest enabling this. For 2.49, guessing from some internet sources it was possible. Currently the “Render result” images doesn’t hold any pixel data.