Q: distutils - name clash protection?

[Calvin Spealman]

I went ahead and looked at 262 as this thread caught my eye and just wanted
to give my two cents: Might be a good idea to not define the format but
only the API? Or, at least to specify that while you may count on the API
you can not count on exactly how it is implemented? Why duplicate the work
done by a system's native package management system(s) if they store the
information you need? Though it would definitely be a powerful tool to
access this information through a standardized Python API, even for only
Python Packages.