I'm working on a buildout script that needs to install a distutils package on remote server.

On PyPi there are 2 recipes for doing this
[collective.recipe.distutils 0.1 and zerokspot.recipe.distutils 0.1.1](http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=recipe.distutils&submit=search).

The later module a derivative of the former, and is a little more convenient then the first, but the both suffer from the same problem, which I will describe now.

When bootstrap.py is executed, it downloads zc.buildout package and puts it into buildout's eggs directory. This gives ./bin/buildout access to zc.buildout code, but /usr/local/python does not know anything about zc.buildout at this point.

Buildout attepts to install the package by running 'python setup.py install' inside of a subprocess. This produces an ImportError because zc.buildout is not installed for /usr/local/python.

So, I have several solutions.

1. Install zc.buildout using easy\_install on the remote server. I don't like this option at all, it makes a special case for a module that is very insignificant.
2. Modify zerokspot.recipe.distutils to put try block around 'import zc.buildout' this way, it will install even if zc.buildout is not installed. It's an ok solution, but somewhat hackish.
3. Replace subprocess with code that will install the package using distutils api or setuptools api. This would be the best solution in my opinion.

The question is how would i do #3?

Thank you,
Taras

PS: I solved the problem by creating another package that does not have dependancy on zc.buildout. My package is called [taras.recipe.distutils](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/taras.recipe.distutils) and it's available on pypi.