Actually, there is fragmentation: pip does not supersedes easy_install, since easy_install does things that pip cannot do (like installing from something that i

Actually, there is fragmentation: pip does not supersedes easy_install, since easy_install does things that pip cannot do (like installing from something that is not a source tarball). Also, distribute being a fork of setuptools, with neither distribute/setuptools being a superset of each other, means more fragmentation as well. Also, the affirmation that everything install fine whether you use setuptools/distribute/distutils is simply not true. We get almost daily bug reports/user complaints in numpy/scipy because of installation issues mostly caused by distutils, or people using pip/easy_install (which does not work with numpy distutils extensions). The situation is confusing for a lot of users, especially the ones who are not super familiar with python.