I'm not sure how people would prefer this be handled. I don't think we need to have a PEP for it - I don't see PEPs for ctypes, elementtree, pysqlite or cProfile, either. I don't have a problem at all with setuptools going into the standard library. It adds a whole pile of extremely useful functionality (easy_install, in particular, is something that people have been asking for, constantly, for YEARS). Making it an additional install is just silly. Sure, it's possible that some people with extremely complicated distutils scripts may find they need to update them. But the alternative to that is complete paralysis - and I can't say that the current state of distutils is at all something to make Python happy. I started refactoring some of the ugliness out of the internals of distutils last year, but was completely stymied by the demand that no existing setup.py scripts be broken. This means that the people who are experts with the current code are fine, but everyone else has to pay the price.