If you wish for the functionality to be available in setuptools (backported), please contribute the change at https://github.com/pypa/distutils. At some point, contributions to CPython will also be synced there as well, and any changes there get synced into Setuptools. Unfortunately, at this stage, that functionality is only exposed through a feature flag when `SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=local` is set... until downstream implementations in Linux distributions and monkeypatches such as with Numpy can be updated not to rely on the implementation details as found in the stdlib.