Please add a listing to this page if you're working on Distutils (and help us reduce duplication of effort).

Cheese Shop / PyPI -- the central repository of python package metadata and distribution files.

Python Eggs -- an effort to produce single-file distributions of packages similar to Java JARs. See http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs

PEPs for extending distutils / PyPI -- PEPs 262 "Database of Installed Python Packages" and 345 "Metadata for Python Software Packages 1.2" are currently open

Uraga -- an effort to develop a tool for download and installation of packages. See http://www.byteofpython.info/projects/uraga/uraga.html

zpkgtools -- a source-based packaging system. See http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/zpkgtools/

Other efforts we know about:

Ian Bicking is looking to clean up and extend the use of release_urls in PyPI for use in [http://pythonpaste.org Paste].

Maurice Ling is looking at implementing PEP 262 as an academic project.

Geoffrey T. Dairiki has a bdist_deb command http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1054967&group_id=5470&atid=305470

[http://www.egenix.com/ eGenix] uses its own extensions to distutils in the various egenix-mx packages called mxSetup.py. Among other things this module contains support for building Unix libraries, limited autoconf support, uninstall command and a clever build_ext command that allows to disable building extensions/packages from the command line and also supports building optional extensions (depending on the availability of certain include and library files).