Differences between distribute, distutils, setuptools and distutils2?

Question

The Situation

I’m trying to port an open-source library to Python 3. (SymPy, if anyone is wondering.)

So, I need to run 2to3 automatically w

Answer 1

I realize that I have replied to your secondary question without addressing unquestioned assumptions in your original problem:

I'm trying to port an open-source library (SymPy, if anyone is wondering) to Python 3. To do this, I need to run 2to3 automatically when building for Python 3.

You may, not need. Other strategies are described at http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/pyporting

To do that, I need to use distribute,

You may :) distutils supports build-time 2to3 conversion for code (not docstrings), in a different manner that distribute’s: http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/pyporting#during-installation