> This is still a bothersome issue, but we've taken to patching every version of python
> downstream before deploying them. All for a simple three line patch.

Sorry about the unsatisfactory situation.  Could we start anew and define exactly what the problem is, so that distutils2 can be free of it?  (I’m afraid distutils can’t be changed: even undocumented, the platform string used for FreeBSD is certainly used by tools out there that we don’t want to break.  I second the suggestion to bring up the issue to the projects responsible for eggs, i.e. setuptools and distribute, not distutils.)