Hello, I've just hit the problem that was mentioned in the thread with the above title (see: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2005-April/004453.html). However, the email trail seemed to have hit a dead end and it wasn't clear to me whether this had been flagged as a bug or whether it was a problem with the way that setup.py was being used. I've included a summary of the problem as I've encountered it below, but would appreciate any clarification on whether this is a bug and I need to wait for patched version, or whether it's a problem with the way I'm using setup.py and there is a change/work around I can use. Many thanks, Jens (this is being run on Ubuntu Dapper:Python 2.4.3 (#2, Oct 6 2006, 07:52:30) [GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2 ) I have the following directory tree dir1/ setup.py __init__.py dir2/ __init__.py doc/ test.txt And the following setup.py: #!/usr/bin/env python from distutils.core import setup setup( packages=['dir1','dir1.dir2'], package_dir = {'dir1': ''}, package_data={'dir1': ['doc/*.txt']} ) I need this done in this way because of the way that my CVS repository has been set up, with the root directory of the source (where the setup.py script lives) also being the root directory of the package, and I thought that the package_dir line above took care of that. On running the script, however, I get: jmht@csevig6:~/dir1$ python setup.py install running install running build running build_py creating build creating build/lib creating build/lib/dir1 copying __init__.py -> build/lib/dir1 creating build/lib/dir1/dir2 copying dir2/__init__.py -> build/lib/dir1/dir2 creating build/lib/dir1/oc error: can't copy 'oc/test.txt': doesn't exist or not a regular file This appears to be caused by a bit in the function get_data_files in the file: /usr/lib/python2.4/distutils/command/build_py.py specifically the line: plen = len(src_dir)+1 If len(src_dir) is 0, which it is in my case, the first character of the directory gets chopped off.