[Distutils] DistUtils does not install

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:59 AM 7/26/2007 +0530, Rajeev Nair wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I am a complete newbie to python and its modules. I have got the 
>following error upon installing DistUtils modules
>
>Python setup.py install
>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "setup.py", line 30, in ?
>     packages = ['distutils', 'distutils.command'],
>   File "/usr/local/Distutils-1.0.2/distutils/core.py", line 101, in setup
>     _setup_distribution = dist = klass(attrs)
>   File "/usr/local/Distutils-1.0.2/distutils/dist.py", line 130, in __init__
>     setattr(self, method_name, getattr(self.metadata, method_name))
>AttributeError: DistributionMetadata instance has no attribute 'get___doc__'
>
>What am I missing here ? Tried Installing some python-devel modules 
>too but they just wouldn't install complaining about the python 
>version to be 2.4. I have installed the same version of python though.
>
>The OS is Suse x86_64 GNU/Linux
>
>Please help.

The distutils are included with modern Python versions; you should 
not attempt to install the standalone version, as it is almost 
certainly *way* out of date.

If your operating system does not include the distutils as part of 
its standard Python installation, you'll need to install whatever 
package (usually python-devel) contains them.

To check if you already have the distutils installed correctly, start 
your python interpreter and "import distutils".  If that doesn't give 
you an error, they're already installed.