Comment # 1 on bug 997614 from Tim Serong

I went digging a little deeper, and it seems that platform.linux_distribution()
is deprecated since python 3.5, and will be removed in python 3.7 (see
https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/platform.html#platform.linux_distribution).

There's some longer discussion at http://bugs.python.org/issue1322,
http://bugs.python.org/issue20454 and other places, and I get the distinct
impression nobody is interesting in fixing this for python 2.x, and that anyone
who wants this function is being steered towards using
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/distro instead.