The patch is minor enough that I added it to 0.6; it only affects URLs that would have caused today's easy_install to crash with an httplib.InvalidURL error, anyway.
The easiest way to use it is to use a -f or dependency_links URL that points to a page with links to the actual downloads. As long as they are the same scheme and host, they'll inherit the credentials from the original URL.
Trying this now, using setuptools-0.6c6dev_r54241, but I must be doing something wrong here, because I cannot get it to work. What I do is: easy_install -f \ https://user:secret@myhost.com/trac/wiki/PackageIndex SomePackage This index page requires authentication and easy_install can indeed read the index page with the supplied credentials. It finds the correct download URL too, i.e.: https://myhost.com/svn/somepackage#egg=SomePackage It was my understanding that easy_install would reuse the credentials as specified for the index page URL, since both host and scheme are identical for the download and index page URLs. However downloading fails, with a 401 Authorization Required error. As I said, it could very well be I'm doing something wrong here. Any hint is highly appreciated. kind regards, jw -- Jan-Wijbrand Kolman