Setuptools adopts distutils from the standard library as a top-level ``distutils`` package and no longer depends on distutils in the standard library. This new ``distutils`` package will be masked by ``distutils`` in the standard library unless that library has been stripped by a downstream package manager or gets removed in a future version. Although this change is not expected to break any use cases, it will likely affect tool chains that are monkey-patching distutils or relying on Setuptools' own monkey-patching of distutils.
Setuptools adopts distutils from the Python 3.9 standard library and no longer depends on distutils in the standard library. When importing ``setuptools`` or ``setuptools.distutils_patch``, Setuptools will expose its bundled version as a top-level ``distutils`` package (and unload any previously-imported top-level distutils package), retaining the expectation that ``distutils``' objects are actually Setuptools objects. Although this change is not expected to break any use cases, it will likely affect tool chains that are monkey-patching distutils or relying on Setuptools' own monkey-patching of distutils.
