Both distribute and setuptools listed in install_requires are not upgraded

I have an unusual situation where I want to require a more recent version of distribute and setuptools during the installation of my code. This is mostly for our own deployment via easy_install to our own servers.

In order to do that I've included entries in our setup.py file with install_requires as follows, but they aren't upgraded from the default versions.

setup(
    name='my-project',
    version='0.1',
    install_requires=[
        ...
        'distribute==0.7.3',
        ...
        'setuptools==20.3.1',
        ...
    ],
    ...
)

The default (because I'm on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) is distribute-0.6.24 and this just gets copied into my virtualenv even though I have the requirements above.

As a note, running pip install --upgrade setuptools==20.3.1 seems to work, but we want to control which package repo these sources come from, so that isn't really an option.

Anybody have insights into why this wouldn't update the egg files in my virtualenv to be the right ones? Much appreciated.

Start by reproducing the setup.py install_requires case with easy_install, the listed distribute and setuptools versions, and the Ubuntu 12.04 defaults described in the report. Compare the resulting virtualenv egg files with the pip install --upgrade behavior and trace dependency resolution; done means the cause is identified and the expected upgrade or limitation is documented.