Last week I released a plugin for zc.buildout that adds sftp support: http://www.python.org/pypi/zc.buildoutsftp This is useful when you need to use a private distribution server. I also released a version of buildout that takes advantage of it. This plugin uses the very nice ssh library, paramiko. This plugin should be useful for in other setuptools applications such as easy_install. There isn't really anything buildout specific about it. In fact, it's really more of a setuptools plugin than a buildout plugin. It's implemented as a urllib2 plugin that returns data in a form tailored specifically to setuptools. To use it, just import and call zc.buildoutsftp.buildoutsftp.install(). This installs the sftp handler into urllib2. Then, in your setuptools-based application, you can use sftp urls to name an index server or find links. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org