We are still actively working in fixing all the remaining bugs in Distribute (our Setuptools fork).

But we have reached an important milestone this week: both virtualenv and zc.buildout now comes with an option to switch to Distribute.

In virtualenv:

$ virtualenv --distribute ENV

In zc.buildout, using its bootstrap.py file:

$ python bootstrap.py --distribute

Enjoy !

For those who may wonder why they should switch to Distribute over Setuptools, it’s quite simple:

Distribute 0.6.x is a drop-in replacement for Setuptools

Distribute is actively maintained, and has over 10 commiters

Distribute 0.6.x offers Python 3 support !

And if you still struggle with packaging issues, the place to hang around to get some help is the #distutils IRC channel on Freenode.