> Donald made an interesting suggestion over on https://github.com/pypa/packaging-problems/issues/127#issuecomment-374401331, which was to have distutils stop overwriting the Author metadata with the Maintainer metadata when both are specified and instead emit a warning about an unknown keyword argument.

To be honest, that would not have helped in this situation. I didn't encounter this bug in distutils, I encountered it in setuptools, and I tried fixing it in both places because the comments on issue 962772 indicated that this *should* have been supported in distutils.

In the end I think it's fair to either freeze the distutils API and add a DeprecationWarning to indicate that this is no longer supported and everyone should move to setuptools or modernize it completely.