parameters (like \UNIX) are commonly entered using an empty group to
separate the markup from a following inter-word space; this is not
needed when the next character is punctuation, or the markup is the
last thing in the enclosing group. These cases were marked
inconsistently; the empty group is now *only* used when needed.
distutils patches, which I'll leave to the distutils maintainers.
Tip: review the patch like this:
grep "^[\!+-] " <patchfile>
To get a quick and easy way to review the actual changes. Most of the
changes are single-line ones, anyway.