Thomas, sorry if my message was short and unclear.  The freeze policy means that distutils does not get new features, only bug fixes.  The goal is to free time so that the developers (especially Tarek) can work on distutils2, the next generation.  When I said that “changing even internal details breaks third-party tools”, I was talking about tools written in Python that use distutils as a library; they rely on implementation details, internal functions and old bugs, which means distutils can’t get the changes we need to significantly improve the state of Python packaging.  That’s why Tarek has started distutils2, where compatibility can be broken to fix design mistakes and add disruptive new features.

Like I said, we’ve removed bdist_rpm in distutils2; it now lives as an external project: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypi2rpm/0.3 .  When distutils2 is merged back into the standard library, bdist_rpm2 can have shorter release cycles to comply with policy changes on rpm-based systems.

In this case, the freeze does not apply: This bug should be fixed in distutils.  Can you update your patch to address Toshio’s remarks?  Thanks.