In creating a source distribution, I have found a disparity between the behaviors of distutils and setuptools with respect to package_data. As of python Issue 2279: http://bugs.python.org/issue2279, entries listed in package_data are used when building an sdist. I have verified that this works in a simple example when setup() is imported from distutils.core. However, if I import setup() from setuptools, it does not pull in the data as listed in package_data (and presumedly data_files). I see that the documented behavior for setuptools is to do some searching to see what files are in source control, but I think that is broken too (maybe an issue with the new SVN 1.7?), as the files I was trying to include are under version control. In any case, this deviation in behavior is very confusing as I am often lead to believe that setuptools builds upon distutils, so I am often using the distutils documentation as they are fairly complete. I would suggest incorporating both distutils' and setuptools' behavior in this regard. Thanks, Ben Root P.S. - on a related note, for a package "foo", foo.egg-info directory is created with a SOURCES.txt file. I have found that under certain situations, it seems that a successful install would result in a fully listed SOURCES.txt, and then subsequent calls to sdist seems to use that information to build seemingly correct archives. A co-working double-checking a deployment process I made did an sdist and created a source distribution without the package_data when he did a fresh checkout, but whenever I did it from my development branch, the source distribution worked fine. I haven't figured out exactly how this came about, but it seems to be tied to the SOURCES.txt file.