Whenever you install, upgrade, or change versions of a package, EasyInstall automatically installs the scripts for the selected package version, unless you tell it not to with -x or —exclude-scripts. If any scripts in the script directory have the same name, they are overwritten.
This behaviour has plagued me in my recent adventures in Python. Trying to have a shared scripts directory for various versions of Python leads to the unversioned script being overwritten by the most recently installed package.
It appears the Distribute package’s Easy_Install documentation provides some suggestions on how to address this issue of various package versions with scripts residing in the same location:
EasyInstall’s default behavior means that you can normally only run scripts from one version of a package at a time. If you want to keep multiple versions of a script available, however, you can simply use the —multi-version or -m option, and rename the scripts that EasyInstall creates. This works because EasyInstall installs scripts as short code stubs that require() the matching version of the package the script came from, so renaming the script has no effect on what it executes.
