Good plan.

So the issue is:

 * Platform specific eggs are built containing a path that has the full
   patch level of the freebsd kernel, like "8.2-RELEASE-p2". The "-p2"
   part is updated for every security patch of FreeBSD.
 * Thus when you apply a security patch to FreeBSD, platform specific
   eggs built for that version of FreeBSD (before the security patch
   was applied) are no longer considered compatible.

FYI, FreeBSD has an unwritten policy of keeping all 8.x releases
backwards compatible with one another. So platform specific eggs built
for 8.1 would work without inherent problems on 8.2 or 8.3.

But at the very least, platform specific eggs should not be dependent on
the patch level of the FreeBSD kernel.

On 11/20/2011 03:38 PM, Éric Araujo wrote:
> 
> Éric Araujo <merwok@netwok.org> added the comment:
> 
>> 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.)
> 
> ----------
> 
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue6983>
> _______________________________________