Comment 17 for bug 8395

Providing up-to-date Deb's of the latest Python modules is exactly what we
intend to do. You can see the beginnings of that by doing a default Desktop
installation of Ubuntu and checking out the installed packages list, there are
many, many Python packages.

Python is a major feature goal for me with Ubuntu. I want it to be recognised as
the best platform for people coding in Python. So yes, I'm willing to invest the
resources to do this properly. I *don't* believe that means shipping distutils
as it stands. If there's a need for us to provide the lead then I'm perfectly
willing to fund some work to do that.

  - automatic discovery of needed Python libraries
  - infrastructure to support packaging the very latest and best Python modules
  - community building to get people focused on Python as a universal glue
language in Ubuntu

If distutils can be integrated with apt so that a call to distutils looks in the
APT repositories first, and uses existing packages, and failing that puts the
needed libs in a defined place where they will not interfere with formal
packages, that would be fine. Anthony, would you be interested in doing that work?