This thing's been in limbo too long, so I've made a prerelease snapshot. You can get it with: easy_install -f http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/ setuptools I have fixed all reported bugs, and implemented quite a few new features like MD5 checking (which works even with PyPI's md5 data) and an enhanced "build_ext --inplace" that lets you switch between different Python interpreters without having to recompile your extensions. (The extensions are built in build/, then copied to the source tree whenever you "build_ext" using a different interpreter than the last.) If you have any projects using setuptools, I encourage you to give this snapshot a try, so I can find out if there are still any lurking bugs. If there are no bug reports by next weekend, this will get pushed out as 0.6a1. If you want to look at the documentation, use CVS or browse the EasyInstall.txt, setuptools.txt, and pkg_resources.txt files found at: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/python/python/nondist/sandbox/setuptoo... (I just made some changes to these, however, that may take a few hours to update in SourceForge's anonymous CVS.)