The pypi entry for distutils2 has a comical set of broken links (docs and contributing): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Distutils2

The following two paragraphs have broken links. Adding a link checker to your browser isn't the worst idea.

The Distutils2 codebase is a fork of Distutils. It is not backward compatible with Distutils and does not depend on it. It provides more features and implements new packaging standards. In Python 3.3, Distutils2 is included in the standard library under the module name "packaging". Documentation is provided at http://docs.python.org/dev/packaging 404 --for ease of maintenance, it is not duplicated in this repository. You can use the Packaging documentation to use Distutils2; only the package name is different (packaging vs. distutils2), all modules, classes and functions have the same name.

If you want to contribute, please have a look at DEVNOTES.txt or http://wiki.python.org/Distutils2/Contributing 404 .

First link is broken because the distutils2 project in its current form is stopped and the doc is nowhere.  (Obsolete versions can be found in a few places :/)  Second link is broken due to Python wiki config changes.

I will update the PyPI metadata to explain the status of distutils2 and its successors.  Thanks for the report.

The PyPI page now starts with this text:


Distutils2 development is stopped.

tl;dr: keep using setuptools and pip for now, don’t use distutils2.

Distutils2 tried to be all things to all people; Python core developers and developers of packaging tools have a different strategy to improve packaging. First, various features are discussed and integrated into Python on their own, such as namespace packages and virtual environments (Python 3.3). Second, a new format is defined for binary distibutions (wheel). Third, pip is blessed as de facto standard installer and installed with Python (3.4). Ongoing, new PEPs are in progress to make version numbers more robust, metadata more comprehensive, wheels usable on more platforms, build tools more flexible, etc. Other efforts like conda, bento, hashdist or pyinstaller may serve different needs of specific Python communities better.