while emerging docutils-0.8.1 I got a confusing error message saying that distutils was not installed. Further investigation showed that in fact setuptools was missing (I didn't run python-updater after installing 3.2). I was about to submit this patch to upstream, when I discovered that the setuptools reference was added by the ebuild. --- setup.py.orig 2011-08-30 01:02:28.000000000 -0600 +++ setup.py 2011-10-15 17:39:44.183012148 -0600 @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ import os import glob try: - from distutils.core import setup, Command + from setuptools import setup, Command from distutils.command.build import build from distutils.command.build_py import build_py if sys.version_info >= (3,): @@ -15,8 +15,9 @@ from distutils.command.install_data import install_data from distutils.util import convert_path from distutils import log -except ImportError: - print ('Error: The "distutils" standard module, which is required for the ') +except ImportError as e: + mod = e.args[0].rsplit(" ",1)[1] + print ('Error: The %r module, which is required for the ' %(mod,)) print ('installation of Docutils, could not be found. You may need to ') print ('install a package called "python-devel" (or similar) on your ') print ('system using your package manager.') Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 0. emerge setuptools 1. emerge a new version (slot) of python (e.g. 3.2) 2. don't run python-updater 3. emerge docutils-0.8.1 Actual Results: step 3 produces confusing error message saying distutils is not found. Expected Results: error message should say that setuptools is not found, and suggest running python-updater I would suggest that the ebuild should replace the sed command in src_prepare (line 37) with a real patch. Very few people will ever run into this, so maybe it isn't worth fixing beyond documenting it here.
setuptools is in DEPEND so it shouldn't be missing in the first place, but the patch looks useful.
Now that both ebuilds use -r1 eclasses, it should not happen anymore.
