Version conflict: zc.buildout's version of madness

rants, cookbook

I'm not even trying to understand what happens, because it's aggravating to see buildouts fail like this:

While:
  Installing.
  Getting section zope2.
  Initializing section zope2.
  Installing recipe plone.recipe.zope2install.
Error: There is a version conflict.
We already have: setuptools 0.6c9

or, worse, this:

While:
  Installing.
  Getting section zope2.
  Initializing section zope2.
  Installing recipe plone.recipe.zope2install.
Error: There is a version conflict.
We already have: zc.buildout 1.5.2

Well, technically I know what happens: for example, zc.buildout is latest 2.0a1 now, but I've already installed 1.5.2 in my virtualenv (the bootstrap process failed hard, there are a tons of bugs there, I've had more failures in bootstrap then success, lately) and I had one product in my buildout which depended on zc.buildout, so it tried to pull the latest, only to get a version conflict.

I wish zc.buildout would behave more inteligently. Even specifying 

prefer-final = true

didn't do much to solve my problems. The only way to solve the problem was to add the following to the buildout.cfg file:

[buildout]
...
versions = versions

[versions]
zc.buildout =1.5.2
setuptools = 0.6c9

UPDATE: a better solution is to have:

[versions]
zc.buildout =
setuptools =