Zooko, While we're waiting for the 'official' answer from Tarek...
I don't think the code is being taken from stdeb. There were 'bdist_deb' patches that were developed/tested/contributed a while ago and just never got into distutils. To the best of my knowledge it is that patch set. Of course let's see what Tarek says but I'm pretty sure that's the set.
Regards, Gerry