Please see the top of platform.py:

#    This module is maintained by Marc-Andre Lemburg <mal@egenix.com>.
#    If you find problems, please submit bug reports/patches via the
#    Python SourceForge Project Page and assign them to "lemburg".
#
#    Note: Please keep this module compatible to Python 1.5.2.

I wonder why the ticket wasn't assigned to me.

Regarding the patch: 

 * the dist() function has been superseded by linux_distribution().

 * the supported_dists argument is a documented feature of
linux_distributions(), so should not be removed

 * the Windows name normalization should not be removed (it fixes a bug
in Vista)

 * the change from using string functions to using string methods breaks
1.5.2 compatibility (*)

 * the _ETC_DIR global just makes things harder to read and there's no
apparent need for it

(*) It's probably time to drop 1.5.2 compatibility and only keep the
module compatible to Python 2.1, so this is not much of an issue.

Overall, I think it's better to define a fixed search order for the
release files than to try to figure out and parse random release files
that happen to match the release file RE.

For that to work, it would help a lot if you could provide the file name
and contents of various platform release files.