Python 3.3.0rc1 release notes ( http://python.org/download/releases/3.3.0/ ) claims PEP-405 support, yet pysetup is not in the tarball. (After reading through mailing lists and bugs it's clear that the move to "packaging" module got pulled, so it's still just distutils in there.)

There is no documentation on how to get a pyvenv (or virtualenv, or any other virtual enviroment solution) built venv to gain setuptools/pip support.

PEP 405 is for "venv" support and that is available. Documenting how to use pip/distribute/setuptools with venv is IMHO beyond the scope of the stdlib documentation (and should be easy enough: create a virtual environment using pyvenv, then install pip using its setup.py file).

The pep mentions the pysetup script from the packaging module, but as the packaging module got pulled for python 3.3 the pysetup script is not present in the python 3.3 installation and therefore also not in venv-s.

It's not straightforward, at all.

# (v3.3rc1) /home/pas/wololo/pip-1.1$ python setup.py install

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 3, in <module>
    from setuptools import setup
ImportError: No module named 'setuptools'


Then, of course one can try installing setuptools, but it won't work.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 7, in <module>
    execfile(convert_path('setuptools/command/__init__.py'), d)
NameError: name 'execfile' is not defined

So, yes, venv is available. Great. But Python is not so great without those batteries, which are allegedly included.

pyvenv won't install setuptools because setuptools is not a stdlib package. Having packaging would have been nice, but that library was not in a good enough shape for the 3.3 release.

I don't understand what you try to do in the second traceback. Installing distribute works fine though:

1) Create environment using pyvenv: $ pyenv myenv
2) Download distribute archive from PyPI
3) Extract this archive
4) Install: $ cd distribute-0.6.28; ../pyenv/bin/python setup.py install

If you have a setup.py file where you want to use the distribute package you can use distribute_setup, as described in <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute/#distribute-setup-py>. I'm using this in my own packages and this works fine with pyvenv as well.

Thank you. The missing detail was to install distribute when a package needs setuptools.

So, documentation. The setuptools page doesn't even mention distribute. The PEP mentions both, even though setuptools pretty much looks incompatible with Py3.3.

Anyway. I'm honestly grateful for your immediate responses. Thanks again for sorting this out, let's hope others will find this via a search engine.