Getting easy_install working for IronPython will be a big win for the IronPython ecosystem, and as I mentioned last time, the lack of zlib is really the only thing holding it back. Well, IronPython.Zlib solves that problem, so what else is holding up easy_install?
The big thing that's missing for setuptools is zipimport support, which is used to implement the Egg packages. To get things working, a stub zipimport module is needed with the following contents:
zipimporter = None
Next, make sure you are using at least Python 2.5.2 standard library (I'm not sure what version comes with IronPython 2.0, but it should be at least that new). The version of tarfile shipped with 2.5.0 doesn't seem to work at all.
Now some changes need to be made to the Python standard library. First up, since _winreg.error is not defined, distutils/msvccompiler.py must be patched to use WindowsError instead. We can't build C extensions anyway (or rather, there would be no point), but setuptools will still try. Then, py_compile.py needs to be changed so that the compile() funtion, well, doesn't – put "return" as the first statement, as IronPython can't create .pyc files (yet). Finally (and this is an IronPython.Zlib problem), do not throw if the CRC-32 check fails in gzip.py. A patch for all of these is available.
The next big changes is to implement binascii.crc32, which is used by the zipfile module. easy_install always tries to build an Egg, which requires zipfile (an Egg is just a .zip with some special files). This requires recompiling IronPython.Modules. I used the same (slightly questionable) CRC-32 implementation I used for IronPython.Zlib.
Once you get this far, easy_install can download, extract, and build a Python library (I used simplejson for my tests). Installation is still a problem because pkg_resources is looking for an Egg, which require zipimport, which was blanked out in the first step (it's almost poetic, really). Getting zipimport working should be the last major hurdle.