At 04:17 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

Now I am astonished that we are talking about reverting changes in Distutils that were done for bugfixes, for a third party package that does monkey patches on Distutils.

Subclassing is not monkeypatching, so if you consider the above to be a general policy, then the developers of at least Numpy and Twisted should consider themselves warned that bugfix releases may break their build processes.