All the tests pass whenever I merge upstream changes, but I'm not sure how much
confidence the maintainers have about test coverage and whether all tests passing
means enough for them to release into the wild.
if they did release it to the wild, then the decision get's passed to virtualenv, as to when it feels comfortable including the upgrade.
virtualenv/pip end's up being how many user's will first encounter distribute releases (and problems if there are any).
running the pip test suite against distribute RCs before releasing would be a good idea.
I'm happy to work with distribute people to make that happen.