For the future, we generally tend to keep distutils pretty "frozen", only making minor changes or the changes needed to build Python itself. Instead we generally make changes in setuptools, which for the moment monkey-patches distutils (and into which distutils will eventually be merged). One of the big reasons is that setuptools is used across all versions of Python, so the changes are automatically backported, whereas changes to distutils will only be seen by people using the most recent Python versions.

In this case, it's not really a substantive change, so I think we can leave it in distutils, I just wanted to bring this up as an FYI.