This was brought up a while back by someone working with experimental svn 1.6: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2008-February/008794.html But I'm not sure it was addressed, and now we're getting the same problem here with svn 1.5.1. This same fix fixes it: --- sdist.py.vanilla 2008-08-18 20:54:07.000000000 -0700 +++ sdist.py 2008-08-18 20:12:11.000000000 -0700 @@ -1,5 +1,6 @@ from distutils.command.sdist import sdist as _sdist from distutils.util import convert_path +from distutils import log import os, re, sys, pkg_resources entities = [ But I'm not sure it's the best one. It's definitely good that this fix should address the problem once and for all (i.e. no re-break on future svn versions), but maybe there is a better larger fix. I think it should be addressed somehow though since svn 1.5.1 is now the latest release. Thanks, --dan