diff --git a/requests/packages/README.rst b/requests/packages/README.rst
index c42f376b..83e0c625 100644
--- a/requests/packages/README.rst
+++ b/requests/packages/README.rst
@@ -1,8 +1,11 @@
 If you are planning to submit a pull request to requests with any changes in 
-this library do not go any further. These are independent libraries which we 
-vendor into requests. Any changes necessary to these libraries must be made in 
+this library do not go any further. These are independent libraries which we
+vendor into requests. Any changes necessary to these libraries must be made in
 them and submitted as separate pull requests to those libraries.
 
 urllib3 pull requests go here: https://github.com/shazow/urllib3
 
 chardet pull requests go here: https://github.com/chardet/chardet
+
+See https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/pull/1812#issuecomment-30854316
+for the reasoning behind this.
diff --git a/requests/packages/__init__.py b/requests/packages/__init__.py
index d62c4b71..971c2ad0 100644
--- a/requests/packages/__init__.py
+++ b/requests/packages/__init__.py
@@ -1,3 +1,36 @@
-from __future__ import absolute_import
+'''
+Debian and other distributions "unbundle" requests' vendored dependencies, and
+rewrite all imports to use the global versions of ``urllib3`` and ``chardet``.
+The problem with this is that not only requests itself imports those
+dependencies, but third-party code outside of the distros' control too.
 
-from . import urllib3
+In reaction to these problems, the distro maintainers replaced
+``requests.packages`` with a magical "stub module" that imports the correct
+modules. The implementations were varying in quality and all had severe
+problems. For example, a symlink (or hardlink) that links the correct modules
+into place introduces problems regarding object identity, since you now have
+two modules in `sys.modules` with the same API, but different identities::
+
+    requests.packages.urllib3 is not urllib3
+
+With version ``2.5.2``, requests started to maintain its own stub, so that
+distro-specific breakage would be reduced to a minimum, even though the whole
+issue is not requests' fault in the first place. See
+https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/pull/2375 for the corresponding pull
+request.
+'''
+
+from __future__ import absolute_import
+import sys
+
+try:
+    from . import urllib3
+except ImportError:
+    import urllib3
+    sys.modules['%s.urllib3' % __name__] = urllib3
+
+try:
+    from . import chardet
+except ImportError:
+    import chardet
+    sys.modules['%s.chardet' % __name__] = chardet