In distutils/core.py ...

Line 227 is over-indented, inconsistent with the rest of the file.
Line 226 is over-indented, inconsistent with the rest of the file.

Line 114 is over-indented by 2 characters, inconsistent with the rest of the file.
        else:
            raise SystemExit("error in %s setup command: %s" % \
                  (attrs['name'], msg))


Line 113 backslash should not be needed to continue the line between brackets.

Line 102 there is an extra space before the "not" keyword.
    if 'script_args'  not in attrs:


Line 57 could use 1 more blank line above it.

Line 33 'script' is assigned but not used.

Line 32 could use 1 more blank line above it.


run_setup and setup had space before (

Thanks for the contribution. Is there any syntax error on using the file since you have classified it as compile error or the error messages are related to linters? On a general note style related contributions are not merged since they create whitespace noise while traversing git history. I will let it for the reviewers though to decide on this.

Thanks

Oh, I see. I did not realize that tidying would not be accepted. That explains a lot. As it offended linters based on PEPs I chose that as the best match. It is pedantic, but many linting actions are not far from compiling... they are generally parsing to determine PEP compliance.

Thanks for the report and for the PR, John. Karthikeyan is correct.

Many of the modules in the stdlib predate PEP 8. Also, making PEP 8-only changes would make "git blame" less useful and can cause regressions (IIRC it has happened at least once, but I don't remember the details at the moment.)

Closing this as 'rejected'. I hope you will continue contributing to Python!