diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/3.3.rst b/Doc/whatsnew/3.3.rst
index a2d3af17228..e1d1cb4b3cd 100644
--- a/Doc/whatsnew/3.3.rst
+++ b/Doc/whatsnew/3.3.rst
@@ -129,6 +129,19 @@ os
   (Patch submitted by Giampaolo Rodolà in :issue:`10784`.)
 
 
+packaging
+---------
+
+:mod:`distutils` has undergone additions and refactoring under a new name,
+:mod:`packaging`, to allow developers to break backward compatibility.
+:mod:`distutils` is still provided in the standard library, but users are
+encouraged to transition to :mod:`packaging`.  For older versions of Python, a
+backport compatible with 2.4+ and 3.1+ will be made available on PyPI under the
+name :mod:`distutils2`.
+
+.. TODO add examples and howto to the packaging docs and link to them
+
+
 pydoc
 -----
 
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index db9bd000ac3..e277eb941b1 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@ Core and Builtins
 - Issue #11320: fix bogus memory management in Modules/getpath.c, leading to
   a possible crash when calling Py_SetPath().
 
-- _ast.__version__ is now a Mercurial integer and hex revision.
+- _ast.__version__ is now a Mercurial hex revision.
 
 - Issue #11432: A bug was introduced in subprocess.Popen on posix systems with
   3.2.0 where the stdout or stderr file descriptor being the same as the stdin
@@ -260,6 +260,9 @@ Library
 - Issue #12124: zipimport doesn't keep a reference to zlib.decompress() anymore
   to be able to unload the module.
 
+- Add the packaging module, an improved fork of distutils (also known as
+  distutils2).
+
 - Issue #12065: connect_ex() on an SSL socket now returns the original errno
   when the socket's timeout expires (it used to return None).