[Distutils] easy-install question

[Mike Driscoll]

I was told the other day that if I ran the easy-setup.py file on the
PEAK website, it would basically download a broken version of
distutils since the current version is automatically included with
Python. This proved to be correct at my distutils commands quit
functioning altogether when I did that.

So I was wondering if there is some way that easy-install or the
distutils package could be set up to detect if there's a version
already installed? This would allow the program to stop if the local
copy is newer than the one being installed...or it could just warn the
user that they are trying to install an older version and give them
the option to abort or continue.

It would have saved me quite a few headaches if this had been the
case. Thank you for your thoughts!

Mike Driscoll