I've noticed that setuptools seems to flatten any indentation in fields when generating the PKG-INFO metadata file. I noticed this because PEP345 [1] suggests that the long description field can be written in reStructuredText (which would be excellent for my current project), but unfortunately whitespace is being lost that breaks things like literal blocks that require indentation. The trouble seems to be that distutils.util.rfc822_escape strips all excess whitespace and adds 8 spaces of padding to the start of every line. For example:

...

...

rest = """ ... a literal python block:: ... >>> import this ... """ print distutils.util.rfc822_escape(rest)

a literal python block:: >>> import this which generates a few warnings and no literal block when docutils tried to render it. Can anyone tell me if this behaviour is necessary to be rfc822/MIME compliant, or is distutils being over-cautious in flattening out all whitespace? The w3c discussion on multiple lines in rfc822 [2] seems to suggest that whitespace can be 'unfolded' safely, so it seems a shame to be throwing it away when it can have important meaning. [1] http://python.cofman.dk/peps/pep-0345.html [2] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/3_Lexical.html Stephen Emslie