After going over the Hitchhiker Guide to Packaging and some other blog posts I was sold the idea of distutils2 coming to the rescue and giving some clarity to the Python packaging world. However the mail list is dead since 2010 and what is installed by the pip package does not match its own website.
I know it will be included in Python 3.3 but I do not see much fuss about it around the web. Is there any change going on beyond what is said here?
The inclusion of python-distribute has actually been postponed to Python 3.4 – see for example this mail by Nick Coghlan.