It's been several months since I created a distribution using the bdist command. Now I can't seem to build a simple gztar distribution. My MANIFEST.in looks like this: include README RELEASE-NOTES LICENSE MANIFEST include lockfile.py setup.py ACKS recursive-include doc *.rst conf.py Makefile MANIFEST is: ACKS LICENSE MANIFEST README RELEASE-NOTES lockfile.py setup.py doc/glossary.rst doc/index.rst doc/lockfile.rst and I'm executing python setup.py bdist --formats=gztar (where python is 2.7a2+). The output is a .tar.gz file but it includes ".macosx-10.4-i386" in the filename and the tar file itself has more structure and fewer files than I think it should have: % tar tfz dist/lockfile-0.8.macosx-10.4-i386.tar.gz ./ ./Users/ ./Users/skip/ ./Users/skip/local/ ./Users/skip/local/lib/ ./Users/skip/local/lib/python2.7/ ./Users/skip/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ ./Users/skip/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lockfile-0.8-py2.7.egg-info ./Users/skip/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lockfile.py ./Users/skip/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/lockfile.pyc setup.py is simple: from distutils.core import setup setup(name='lockfile', ... bunch of kwd args elided ... ) Where are the missing files? How do I create a platform-independent distribution? -- Skip Montanaro - skip@pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/