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? -- http://worldcookery.com -- Professional Zope documentation and training