I've just checked in PYTHONPATH and --prefix support for ez_setup/easy_install that should "just work", so that the problems Joe Gregorio blogged about the other day can no longer occur. That is, at the point where he tried to use "--prefix" the current SVN version should work, with everything going smoothly from there. (I also fixed the distutils help message wart where it displays wrong usage info.) If you'd like to give it a try, you can experiment with it using: svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools cd setuptools python setup.py install --prefix=~ This should then give you a ~/bin/easy_install command that installs stuff to ~/lib/python2.X/site-packages, as long as you have that site-packages directory on your PYTHONPATH during the initial install and for future use. And of course you can use other prefixes or --install-dir settings, as long as the target directory is on PYTHONPATH, and all the old ways of customizing installation locations should still work. And you no longer need to put any eggs on PYTHONPATH manally, ever. Anyway, I'd appreciate testers' feedback. Please feel free to be brutal in your evaluations, because at this point I'm pushing for an 0.6b1 (yes, *beta*!) release by PyCon. (By the way, for anybody wondering about the difference between ez_setup and easy_install, there really isn't one; ez_setup just downloads setuptools and runs easy_install in a bootstrap mode. So all the enhancements I just made to easy_install will be in effect for ez_setup.py too, once the next official release (0.6a10) is out.)