Folks: I'm trying to get the Nevow project to accept a patch [1] that makes it easier to use Nevow with setuptools, even though the maintainers of Nevow passionately hate setuptools. In such a situation, any tiny unnecessary difference between distutils behavior and setuptools behavior is another grain of sand in the gears. So with the patch that I've offered to Nevow, if you run "./setup.py sdist" without setuptools installed, you get: Nevow-0.9.31+r15049.tar.gz and if you run "./setup.py sdist" with setuptools installed, you get: Nevow-0.9.31-r15049.tar.gz Why are the version numbers different? I personally prefer the '-' instead of the '+' in the version number, and I would be happy if distutils in Python 2.4.5 used '-'. However, unless the distutils is going to start using '-', then I suggest that setuptools v0.6 final also use '+', so that there is one less thing that is different. Regards, Zooko [1] http://www.divmod.org/trac/ticket/2527