I am using distribute and python 3.2a0 while I add py3k support to pip this GSoC and I got a problem using distribute: from distutils.sysconfig import _config_vars ImportError: cannot import name _config_vars Well, in Python 3 the distutils.sysconfig pops a DeprecationWarning, because now Python has sysconfig module. As _config_vars is very specific and 2to3 can't convert it, I suggest using some kind of try/except in the source code, like: try: from distutils.sysconfig import _config_vars except ImportError: from sysconfig import _CONFIG_VARS as _config_vars I forked distribute project in bitbucket and added this bugfix, check it here: http://bitbucket.org/hltbra/distribute/changeset/002cccf004e6 I would like to use distribute with this bugfix asap, so, please, upload it to PyPI :)