Somebody reported to me that one of my project releases [1] has suddenly stopped being installable for people who don't already have setuptools installed. The breakage occurred because the recommended method for providing a bootstrap (bundling ez_setup.py -- or FWIW, ez_setup/__init__.py, in my case) at least as of setuptools-0.6a11, unconditionally fetches the version of setuptools whose version number is embedded in ez_setup.py. That now fails for 0.6a11, because that version has been removed from PyPI. Obviously people trying to install this old release of mine can still install setuptools manually by downloading ez_setup.py themselves. But it would be nice if in future, the bootstrap were clever enough to fetch a directory listing and then grab the latest setuptools release. Otherwise, project releases that were very easy to install in the past suddenly become more complicated to install just because the PyPI setuptools download area has been cleaned up. [1] http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/ClientCookie/src/ClientCookie-1.3.0.tar.gz John