This morning I updated to subversion-1.4. There have been several significant enhancements in this release (see http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.4_releasenotes.html), and it appears that numpy.distutils is not compatible with working copies created with the new svn. I submitted a ticket (#276), but I figured it was worth a post here, just a "heads up" for anyone not watching the trac website. $ python setup.py build Running from numpy source directory. non-existing path in 'numpy/distutils': 'site.cfg' No module named __svn_version__ Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 89, in ? setup_package() File "setup.py", line 82, in setup_package configuration=configuration ) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/core.py", line 144, in setup config = configuration() File "setup.py", line 48, in configuration config.add_subpackage('numpy') File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 753, in add_subpackage caller_level = 2) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 736, in get_subpackage caller_level = caller_level + 1) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 683, in _get_configuration_from_setup_py config = setup_module.configuration(*args) File "./numpy/setup.py", line 8, in configuration config.add_subpackage('f2py') File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 753, in add_subpackage caller_level = 2) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 736, in get_subpackage caller_level = caller_level + 1) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 683, in _get_configuration_from_setup_py config = setup_module.configuration(*args) File "numpy/f2py/setup.py", line 39, in configuration config.make_svn_version_py() File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 1298, in make_svn_version_py self.add_data_files(('', generate_svn_version_py())) File "/home/darren/src/numpy/numpy/distutils/misc_util.py", line 1281, in generate_svn_version_py assert revision is not None,'hmm, why I am not inside SVN tree???' AssertionError: hmm, why I am not inside SVN tree??? Darren