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To explain my position: distutils is a very brittle codebase that’s used and monkey-patched by a lot of third-party code. In the past, before the forking of distutils/packaging, Tarek tried to gradually improve distutils but he got a lot of pushback when his changes broke this third-party code that relied on known bugs or undocumented behavior or worked around it. That’s why a feature freeze is now in effect, and behavior is not changed unless it is to fix a bug.
In this case, it is not documented that distutils should run under python -E, and nobody reported it as a bug before, that’s why I have the position that the tests that require $PATH should be skipped, and the code left untouched.
For distutils2 (named packaging in the 3.3 standard library), we can improve find_executable. We even want to extract it and move it to shutil: #444582