It's annoying to get conflicts on changes in distutils in the trunk,
when forward-porting to 3.x, because other changes where made there and
only there.

Things like PEP8-ification and modern syntax changes needs to be
backported to 2.7 when appliable to reduce the gap.

What specific changes do you have in mind?

PEP8 :
  - removing space between function names and () 
     like:  function () -> function()

  - function(arg1,
             arg2,
             arg3)

    becomes 
 
    function(arg1, arg2, arg3)

- remove the usage of string.translate, type(foo) is StringType etc..

Hmm. Ok. I was hoping you could point to a revision number...

Unfortunately, these changes are most of the time made as small extra
changes when people are working in distutils modules :

they fix something, and in the same changeset, they fix a small PEP-8
issue in the area they are working on.

So it seems hard to merge back the revisions.

What I am doing now (if you think it's OK), is running a diff so my
changes make the trunk look like Py3's one in this area..

That's ok in principle, as long as you avoid committing behavioral
changes along with style changes in the same change set.

I don't need a ticket for this I guess, it's done progressively