(Patch submitted by Giampaolo Rodolà in :issue:`10784`.)
+packaging
+---------
+
+:mod:`distutils` has undergone additions and refactoring under a new name,
+:mod:`packaging`, to allow developers to break backward compatibility.
+:mod:`distutils` is still provided in the standard library, but users are
+encouraged to transition to :mod:`packaging`. For older versions of Python, a
+backport compatible with 2.4+ and 3.1+ will be made available on PyPI under the
+name :mod:`distutils2`.
+
+.. TODO add examples and howto to the packaging docs and link to them
+
+
pydoc
-----
- Issue #11320: fix bogus memory management in Modules/getpath.c, leading to
a possible crash when calling Py_SetPath().
-- _ast.__version__ is now a Mercurial integer and hex revision.
+- _ast.__version__ is now a Mercurial hex revision.
- Issue #11432: A bug was introduced in subprocess.Popen on posix systems with
3.2.0 where the stdout or stderr file descriptor being the same as the stdin
- Issue #12124: zipimport doesn't keep a reference to zlib.decompress() anymore
to be able to unload the module.
+- Add the packaging module, an improved fork of distutils (also known as
+ distutils2).
+
- Issue #12065: connect_ex() on an SSL socket now returns the original errno
when the socket's timeout expires (it used to return None).