Please be gentle... Newbie to distutils, trying to install django 0.95 egg (www.djangoproject.com) from behind a corporate windows firewall. django in turn tries to download and install setuptools - which fails due to firewall. As per ez_setup.py error message, I downloaded the setuptools egg, put it in the same dir and re-ran: but got same message. Took a look at the code and found out why (expects the egg to be in the temp dir, not same dir). Strikes me it's most likely I was doing something wrong / missed an option / some other rudimentary mistake. Assuming that's the case, could someone set me straight? In the unlikely event I've found a bug I've attached a patched version below. Note the patch is anything but elegant, driven by minimal change rather than elegant solution. Very un-pythonic I know. Like I said, please be gentle... - Scoot. -- def download_setuptools( version=DEFAULT_VERSION, download_base=DEFAULT_URL, to_dir=os.curdir, delay = 15 ): """Download setuptools from a specified location and return its filename `version` should be a valid setuptools version number that is available as an egg for download under the `download_base` URL (which should end with a '/'). `to_dir` is the directory where the egg will be downloaded. `delay` is the number of seconds to pause before an actual download attempt. """ import urllib2, shutil egg_name = "setuptools-%s-py%s.egg" % (version,sys.version[:3]) saveto = os.path.join(to_dir, egg_name) #------------------------------------------------ #Change begins #Don't download if the egg is in the current dir. #This is a horrible hack; should check for existence #in calling routine and possibly skip temp dir creation #altogether - depends on whether it's used subsequently by #setuptools. try: os.stat(egg_name) shutil.copyfile(egg_name, saveto) except: # change ends (remainder indented though) #------------------------------------------------ url = download_base + egg_name src = dst = None if not os.path.exists(saveto): # Avoid repeated downloads try: from distutils import log if delay: log.warn(""" --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This script requires setuptools version %s to run (even to display help). I will attempt to download it for you (from %s), but you may need to enable firewall access for this script first. I will start the download in %d seconds. (Note: if this machine does not have network access, please obtain the file %s and place it in this directory before rerunning this script.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------""", version, download_base, delay, url ); from time import sleep; sleep(delay) log.warn("Downloading %s", url) src = urllib2.urlopen(url) # Read/write all in one block, so we don't create a corrupt file # if the download is interrupted. data = _validate_md5(egg_name, src.read()) dst = open(saveto,"wb"); dst.write(data) finally: if src: src.close() if dst: dst.close() return os.path.realpath(saveto)