(Mailing-list message, reproduced here: http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2012-December/023823.html )

Hi,

py2cairo used to be installable with distutils but the setup.py file was 
just removed just before the 1.10.0 release, for reasons unknown to me. 
The same file was more recently added back to pycairo for Python 3, but 
that change is still unreleased.

The attached patch add the setup.py file back to py2cairo. Please consider 
merging it, making new releases for both py2cairo and pycairo, and 
registering py2cairo in the Python Package Index. (Just linking to 
http://cairographics.org/pycairo is enough so that setuptools/pip can 
manage to find the release tarballs.)

Installing with distutils really helps to integrate with pip,
virtualenv, and many other tools in the Python ecosystem. Right now 
users have to do crazy hacks to use pycairo with virtualenv’s 
--no-site-packages isolation:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11491268/install-pycairo-in-virtualenv/13279739

Hopefully in the near future, users can just run "pip install py2cairo" 
in a virtualenv; projects like WeasyPrint and CairoSVG can add 'pycairo' 
to the install_requires line of their own setup.py file: everything will 
Just Work®.