Thoughts attached.

Yeah that one is great! :) And true. No, the distutils2 project continues and is still being actively

developed. (distutils2 *is* packaging - the name on PyPI is just different from the name that will be used when it is added to the standard library). Bento is a project that aims to tackle part of distutils that distutils2 hasn't really looked at yet: creating a more flexible build system (or, more accurately, making it easier to hook into *existing* build systems rather than defining yet another one).

Ok. Now the distinction is clear. Good to hear disutils2 is still actively developed. Those PEPs are *already* standards and are actively supported by

external projects today.

I just found the wheel project: https://bitbucket.org/dholth/wheel It tries to implement those standards by patching distribute and pip. I run the demo and I think the resulting package format is just amazing. In a nutshell is a binary format (extensions get compiled) which in my opinion is really flexible. I hope it will become standard and will be integrated in the major software someday.