Oh wow, this is a pretty gnarly issue for the Python packaging story, considering the looming deprecation of setup.py.

I traced the discussion to [1], which is an interesting read, but it seems that progress on this died out in April, at least on the Python side.

[1]: https://discuss.python.org/t/linux-distro-patches-to-sysconf...

Grim. Python packaging is a skip (dumpster) full of dead rats.