Pip is a popular installer and uninstaller of Python packages. Currently, pip depends on the third-party packaging extensions in setuptools, or the distribute fork. The future of Python packaging is distutils2 ("packaging" in the Python 3.3+ standard library), and pip should gain support for using distutils2/packaging as an alternative to setuptools/distribute (though setuptools/distribute support needs to be maintained as well for some time to come).
Possible areas of work for a proposal here:
Adding support for installing distutils2-style projects (with setup.cfg and possibly no setup.py, PEP 345 metadata), by using the appropriate distutils2 APIs.
Adding support for introspecting and uninstalling PEP 376-style installed distributions, again using distutils2 APIs wherever possible.
- Charting areas of overlap between pip and distutils2 and modifying pip to optionally prefer distutils2 APIs, if available, for areas of functional overlap (e.g. finding candidate distributions for installation).