Wow, what a total FAIL of a mail, apoliges for that :-( Okay, let me try this again from the top... So, I had a buildout that looked like this: [buildout] parts = eggs setuptools-version = == 0.6c8 zc.buildout-version = == 1.0.6 [eggs] recipe = zc.recipe.egg eggs = BeautifulSoup == 3.0.7a interpreter = py extra-paths = . ...using the (apparently soon to be deprecated) setuptools-version and zc.buildout-version options. From what Jim said, I changed this to be: [buildout] parts = eggs versions = versions [versions] setuptools = 2 zc.buildout = 2 BeautifulSoup = 4 [eggs] recipe = zc.recipe.egg eggs = BeautifulSoup interpreter = py extra-paths = . I deliberately picked non-existent versions in the hope that I'd see error messages saying these versions didn't exist. I could have sworn that the first time I ran buildout after this, nothing happened. But, given my recent finger clumsiness, I'm not so sure. Especially as now when I try, I get error messages about not being able to find distributions until I've changed the buildout to: [buildout] parts = eggs versions = versions [versions] setuptools = 0.6c8 zc.buildout = 1.0.6 BeautifulSoup = 3.0.7a [eggs] recipe = zc.recipe.egg eggs = BeautifulSoup interpreter = py extra-paths = . So I think everything's working as I expected, but I'm still left wondering if there are any situations where a [versions] section won't be checked and/or acted upon? cheers, Chris -- Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk