You already know that package managers are often used to install, upgrade, and uninstall packages. We'll look at one such manager in this lesson, but first, let's talk a bit about the basics of Python's packaging system.
Distutils and Setuptools Packages
Python ships with the distutils package. It's responsible for creating distributions — code archives that people can unpack in the target environment and install so that the Python interpreter sees the unpacked code. When creating a package, the programmer goes to the root directory of the future package and creates a file called setup.py, in which he imports the setup function from the `distutils' module and calls it. So every package contains a program to check itself.
You can read more about how distutils works in the package's official documentation, but let's move on for now.
The distutils package has been around for quite some time and is no longer needed. Programmers use the Setuptools much more widely.
