My question was less about the political aspects than the technical aspects. I gather you're saying that the fix to setuptools will make it work in 2.6.3 without inadvertently breaking it for 2.6.2, 2.6.1, and 2.6.0, right? Have you tried the fix in those older versions to be sure?
If, as I hope, the answer to that is "yes", then I strongly support releasing a fixed setuptools instead of reverting the change to Python.
Yes it does.
The fix makes sure build_ext.get_ext_filename still works as it is supposed (just returning the extension of a filename depending on the environment) under all versions,
I don't think this is factually correct. I assume you talk about distribute change e07e5309cd2a, right? While that change arranges to always return a result when called with an unqualified module name, it doesn't do the additional computation that setuptools does in that case, which may give something different in case the extension is a Library or in case _links_to_dynamic is true. So I would rather expect that distribute is now broken in these cases (which are seemingly rare, though).
It's two lines in Setuptools.
But that change may be incorrect. Regards, Martin