[Distutils] Distribute: will not build on Python 3 with --install-XXX arguments

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 March 2013 12:50, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> Still no joy with the uninstalled setuptools, then? It seemed to work for me without any special work, but that was on Linux.
>
> Yeah, again it seems to be subtle environmental issues. Sometimes it
> works, sometimes it doesn't, never with a useful error message :-(
>
> It's mainly for setup.py - the hooks that override normal distutils
> functionality seem to be the flaky bit. The errors generally seem to
> be coming from core distutils, when I should be running setuptools
> (things like "unknown option, --single-version-externally-managed"
> even though setuptools is on sys.path).
>
> Not worth wasting any more time over, in my opinion.
> Paul.

FWIW, from a discussion w/Jason earlier this week, I believe this is
probably because distribute doesn't ship a built
setuptools.egg-info/entry_points.txt, unlike setuptools which includes
this file in revision control specifically to prevent such
bootstrapping issues. So, the problem should be going away at some
point.