Bob Ippolito wrote:

Well, if it makes a difference, EasyInstall works great on Mac OS X and Windows. If Debian users had been more active with the EasyInstall development process then the experience would be better there also.

I've used EasyInstall on Debian all along, without problems (well, no more than anyone else I think). I guess I just happened to avoid conflicts with debian packages (well, sometimes). The setuptools deb package should just be removed; as far as I can tell nothing depends on it anyway (well, at least on my now-Ubuntu system "apt-cache rdepends python2.3-setuptools" shows nothing). There is a significant concern about setuptools conflicting with Debian packages, which I have encountered, and you can't always uninstall the Debian package because that can have cascading effects. At some point there needs to be a way to tell setuptools that a package has been provided, egg or no egg. Surprisingly nothing depends on ElementTree (that I can find), but docutils is caught up in the network of Debian dependencies. (Well, there's also ways of indicating to Debian that you've provided a dependency somehow besides the package, but I can't remember how.) Since this really has just become a Distutils discussion I'll copy it over there... -- Ian Bicking / ianb@colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org