I’ve patched most of bdist_wininst and started to work on a few tests which work under 2.7 and fail under 3.2 without the fixes so that I can assume I’ve not broken anything.

However, the mapping API of the Metadata class is quite unfriendly.  For example, if I try to replace metadata.long_description with metadata['description'], no exception will be raised if the metadata does not contain a description, it will return 'UNKNOWN'.  Code quickly becomes ugly.  I will open another report to ask Tarek to allow me to revamp the mapping API of Metadata so that code can be easier to write and read.

(I’m also removing the dependency on another bug that’s not really a blocker.)