borntyping

It sounds like you're trying to package an entire application, not a python package. If thats the case, maintaining and distributing it may be simplest to do with a git repository.

Doesn't distribute miss out on a few of setuptools really useful features, like develop installs?

I put the version information inside the package, then anything with access to the package (which both setup.py and sphinx have) can access it - quite useful for doing things like checking the version number from the REPL, for instance.

While I've already been doing things a similar way, it's nice to have a clean, clear explanation of how to package stuff.

Because the only difference there is neater indentation, which you could do using the keywords method.

Additionally, there's no point checking that the script is the main file, as there's only ever one use-case for the script, and that's to call setuptools.

There is absolutely no reason to use this. As far as I can tell, it's a direct port of underscore.js, and implements nothing but functionality that's already in python.

After having difficulty trying to write a console application with python/curses, this looks a much nicer way of doing it.