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From Chad Lester:
> I was setting up a new redhat machine, and had forgotten to install the
> python-devel rpm. The distutils provide a fairly ugly stack trace / error
> message. Luckily, it meant something to me... but it's not terribly user
> friendly!
> 
> ...
> File "/usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils/sysconfig.py", line
> 368, in get_config_vars
> func()
> File "/usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils/sysconfig.py", line
> 280, in _init_posix
> raise DistutilsPlatformError, my_msg
> distutils.errors.DistutilsPlatformError: invalid Python
> installation: unable to open /usr/lib/python1.5/config/Makefile (No such
> file or directory)
> 
> 

This only applies for people installing Distutils
under Python 1.5.2, so it will only be fixed if
there is another Distutils release to support 1.5.2 --
which is unlikely.

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Greg, I don't understand your last comment on this bug. 
Surely the traceback will still be ugly for people running
Python 2.2 or whatever who don't have the python-devel RPM
installed? I don't see how this is only a 1.5.2 or a
"installing Distutils" question. 

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A simple fix is in the attached patch; it simply adds DistutilsPlatformError to the list of the exception classes caught 
by core.setup(). 
However, maybe that exception handler should 
catch DistutilsError, instead of listing a few particular subclasses of it. Some subclasses represent internal errors or a bad setup file, but 
as users can always get the full traceback by setting the DISTUTILS_DEBUG environment variable, there seems little need to 
ever show the full traceback by default.

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I've checked in my proposed fix (the more liberal version that catches
all DistutilsError exceptions) as revision 1.54 of distutils/core.py.