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.
