The following is a first cut at a distutils 'fetch' command, and a small script to make invoking this easier. The script massages the arguments, and calls a distutils 'setup' stub to do the work. It accepts either a filename (which is assumes is a local cached copy of the package, it then unpacks and builds it), a URL (in which case it fetches the URL, unpacks and builds it), or anything else is assumed to be a 'package name' - hopefully PyPI will grow a 'download_url' parameter, and it will "just work". Comments welcome - it's not complete (the zipfile unpacker needs to be done - I plan to "fix" zipfile so it's got a nice tarfile-like interface, probably other stuff), but I'd like to know if this is worth pursuing further... I don't have a name for the script yet - it's called 'distutils-helper' at the moment, but that sucks :) Anthony