We noticed the other day that distutils, despite being part of the standard library, checks the version of Python it's running under and has some different code paths - one of which is only taken for Python < 2.2.

We haven't managed to figure out why this is necessary. So this issue is partly a patch and partly a question: is there a reason that distutils can't assume it's run on the version of Python it came with? If so, I'm happy to make a new patch adding a comment to explain that. If not, I'll go looking for other places where it has unnecessary checks, and we can clean up one little corner of wtf.