[Distutils] setuptools fails to install package data from ZIP distribution

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Packages with Zope software typically contain lots of package data 
(templates, resources, translations, configuration files). Last night we 
had somebody with a Windows machine make distributions of some of our 
eggs (using python setup.py sdist) for the first time. It turns out, 
'sdist' on Windows creates a ZIP file while on other platforms it 
creates a gzipped tarball. I find that difference in behaviour a bit 
disturbing.

That behaviour isn't the actual root of the problem we experienced, 
however. These ZIP distributions were then uploaded to PyPI and other 
people happily started installing them. The only problem was that on 
Linux and MacOSX, the installed eggs no longer contained any of the 
package data. The distributions (the ZIP files) do contain it, but 
somehow setuptools fails to install it properly.

Is this a known bug?

Is there a reason for the different default behaviour of 'sdist' on the 
different platforms?


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