Thank you _very_ much for drawing padawan’s path in this actual maze !
This kind of post is priceless on these (not so rare) subjects about which it is merely impossible to clearly lay the land.
Bests
http://vaab.blog.kal.fr vaab
Happy to help, I’m feeling sometimes lonely on this topic. Furthermore, I should add that I’ve recently learned that “distutils2“ development is ‘officially’ stopped: the exact phrasing from Eric Araujo can be read here: http://bugs.python.org/issue17574
Éric Araujo
FTR, the site-packages issue is caused by Debian/Ubuntu renaming the directory dist-packages. setuptools and pip have work-arounds for that, but distutils2 did not.