Distutils
Distutils is by now the standard mechanism to distribute Python packages and extensions, and appeared in Python 1.6. It runs under 1.5.2 though, but you have to install it (once) to use it for that Python version.
Pycon work
DistutilsVersionFight : the goal is to come up with a proposal in distutils-SIG
Distutils/StandardizeEggInfo : the goal is to finalize PEP 376
Distutils/Metadata : the goal is to finalize PEP 345
Distutils/StaticMetadata : the goal is to come out with a proposal to split setup.py into a static metadata file + a lighter, almost empty script.
Distutils/Friends : the goal is to try to find a project, a person or a group of person on each platform that is willing to maintain a third-party tool that build system-specific distros out of python package.
Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem : a plugin system to build the MANIFEST file
Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem/Draft : Plugin system draft
Learning Distutils
Documentation
distutils — Building and installing Python modules
Distributing Python Modules - information for developers
Installing Python Modules - information for users and system administrators
PyPI's XML-RPC interface for querying the packages database
Projects
/Projects - please add a listing to this page if you're working on Distutils (and help us reduce duplication of effort)
/Extensions is a repository of extensions for your "setup.py".
Tutorials
/Tutorial is a small tutorial to introduce the topic. It includes a complete demo, from start to finish.
CheeseShopTutorial is a related tutorial that just covers submitting information to the Python Package Index
Python Package Index Tutorial by Jeremy Hylton covers the use of the distutils register command.
Misc.
#distutils - irc channel for Distutils