Python setuptools and get_python_version is not defined

If you run into the below error when using setuptools (setup.py), then it’s quite possible that you’re using an outdated version of Python’s setuptools. In particular, the python-setuptools package in the CentOS yum repository is too old.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “setup.py”, line 19, in ?
setup(**metadata)
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/distutils/core.py”, line 149, in setup
dist.run_commands()
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/distutils/dist.py”, line 946, in run_commands
self.run_command(cmd)
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/distutils/dist.py”, line 966, in run_command
cmd_obj.run()
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setuptools/command/bdist_rpm.py”, line 28, in run
_bdist_rpm.run(self)
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/distutils/command/bdist_rpm.py”, line 377, in run
self.move_file(rpm, self.dist_dir)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setuptools/command/bdist_rpm.py”, line 20, in move_file
getattr(self.distribution,’dist_files’,[]).append(
NameError: global name ‘get_python_version’ is not defined

Luckily, this is quite easy to fix; simply remove the RPM and download the latest version from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools then just run it with “sh” as if it was a normal shell script.