Hi Jason, thank you.

I already tried 1), but could not convince Matthias on an alternative way to achieve the result that Debian wants. If you want, maybe you and I could try restarting those discussions.

2) is fine, but I am not the one that will me maintaining it, so it is a question for the core devs. I mean, I could commit to working on it and dealing with issues, but I am not a core dev, so it would always need to involve someone else.

3) does not really make sense as of the distutils deprecation. What needs to be patched are the install schemes, which are now outside distutils/setuptools.
I had hoped that we were able to have the mechanism proposed here in 3.10, so that people could just replace their distutils patches with it, but it was not possible.

I am not sure how to proceed.