During development of patch for issue #13803, I found redundancy between "sysconfig.py" and "distutils/util.py". The functions are the same, and the return values must be the same too. So programmers *MUST* remember to change both sources in sync. This redundancy must be trimmed. This is not strictly a bugfix, so could be not adequate for 2.7/3.2, but applying for 3.2 at least would easy future merges.
I am afraid the distutils feature freeze prevents us from doing this, even in 3.3. Remember that Tarek initially moved sysconfig from distutils to the top level, and the removal was reverted alongside other improvements when there was outcry at the distutils changes and distutils2 was started. We are aware of the discrepancies between distutils.sysconfig and syconfig; for example, the Mac framework stuff for --user (PEP 371) is different, and the docs for sysconfig misleadingly says that the paths are used by distutils. These will get fixed when I get a chance. distutils2/packaging exclusively uses sysconfig, no more duplication.
Background on the distutils freeze? Right now I don’t have the time and I’m going to be offline until the end of the month. You can look for Tarek Ziadé’s blog posts after PyCon 2010, or wait until I come back and put the links on a wiki page :)
