> I am not sure how we should do this, but here's my proposal
> for distutils2 at least:

> - make this new feature a standalone package that patches distutils
> - release it for 2.x
> - let's add your work in distutils2 as well, so it's back in the stdlib in 3.x

 that would work very well: people doing new setup.py files, converting from python2 etc., will, duh, need to do _some_ conversion: they'll expect breakage and to be using distutils2 anyway.

thank you tarek.