We do use Setup/Setup.local at Google (and have for many years now), and I find it very useful. (FWIW, the 'we would use' comment in msg294174 was about the new '*disabled*' feature, not about Setup files in general.) Avoiding local changes is also important to us, because it makes it much easier to track upstream changes. If anyone was thinking of getting rid of Modules/Setup, please don't, at least not without something more sensible than setup.py to replace it :)

That said, I don't really care about the Setup.dist/Setup distinction. I vaguely recall the situation before we had Setup.dist, which I guess was slightly worse, but primarily for people who build from the source repo. Having a Setup.local file is convenient as long as the Setup file is necessary for the base build, but Setup/Setup.dist doesn't matter.