> I'm not suggesting that python does not test the applications. just reporting
> what I experience.
I was joking :)  What I meant was: I can’t agree with the statement “it could be raised on any other usage as sys.stdout does not have an 'error' attribute” because we have tests and users that use distutils without seeing this error.

> What I did, I opened the setup file (in IDLE) from the distribute 0.6.21 and run this.
setup.py is meant to be run from the command line only.  If you try to run it from IDLE, the behavior is undefined, so I’m inclined to close this bug as invalid.

(A note about this bug tracker: please do not send HTML email, it gets transformed into an unhelpful attachment, and also don’t include whole messages after your reply when you send email.  Thanks in advance!)