> so why didn't blurb get installed for doko?

it's not packaged, and I'm (and I think any other provider of distro packages) not using network access during the build.  Sorry to say, but the assumption that pip should be used to be able to build core python seems to be the wrong direction. Packaging blurb sure is an option, but what kind of value has this as a distro package? only used for building cpython, so why not include it in cpython itself?

I have two use cases:

 - building a distro package from a (pre)release tarball with a
   included NEWS file.  I can handle that by just not calling
   blurb.

 - building a distro package from a release tarball + a diff
   for a branch. I haven't looked yet how I could do that,
   including a current NEWS file.

For the included external C libraries we do have the option to either use the included version, or an external one.  Why not do the same for blurb?