[Distutils] Spurious "required version not available" error for setuptools?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:56 AM 8/31/2006 +0100, Hamish Lawson wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
>>Would you mind including the entire log of the error, too?  Thanks.
>
>----
>robin-hbl% easy_install svn://kid-templating.org/trunk
>Doing subversion checkout from svn://kid-templating.org/trunk to
>/tmp/easy_install-OW_QLh/trunk
>Processing trunk
>Running setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir
>/tmp/easy_install-OW_QLh/trunk/egg-dist-tmp-UO9-nX
>The required version of setuptools (>=0.6a11) is not available, and
>can't be installed while this script is running. Please install
>a more recent version first.

Ah, the plot thickens.  This error message only occurs if there is a 
version *conflict* error - that is, you have an installed version of 
setuptools on your sys.path that is a lower version than 0.6a11.  This 
could happen if your default installation location is later on sys.path 
than the installation location for an older version of setuptools.

Try this:

% python2.4
 >>> import pkg_resources
 >>> print list(pkg_resources.working_set)

And send me the output.  I'm guessing it will show a version of setuptools 
that's less than 0.6a11, and the path shown with it will be different than 
the one you've been installing later versions of setuptools to.

(Oh, and also check which Python version is being run by your easy_install 
script, to make sure you run the same version to do the above.)