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

[Paul Moore]

On 6 March 2013 11:22, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> If it feels like you're yak shaving and you'd rather not be, you could look at
> distribute3 [1], which doesn't need 2to3. It was synchronised with distribute in
> Jan 2013, so it might work for you if you don't need some more recent
> functionality/bug-fix.

Thanks. I had tried distribute3 last night and it failed. But it works
today... :-(

There seems to be some annoyingly subtle environmental dependencies
which affect how distribute's setup.py behaves. but I have no idea
what's going on, or how to get to the bottom of it.

If I do the build from a virtualenv with distribute installed,
everything works fine. So I think the conclusion I have to come to is
that to do anything other than install distribute from source, I need
to be working in an environment (probably a virtualenv) with
distribute already installed. That's a nuisance for what I'm trying to
achieve, as it has bootstrapping consequences, but if that's what's
needed, so be it.

Thanks for the help in any case,
Paul