At 09:06 PM 7/2/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

Maybe the answer is that distutils reject *all* uses of absolute paths on Windows. The PEP can then say whatever you want as far as I'm concerned, as it doesn't affect me. If the existing bugs don't get fixed, though, I'd say that the RECORD file should be explicitly disallowed from containing absolute paths on Windows (for safety reasons if nothing else).

In non bdist cases (e.g. setup.py with manual options, but also easy_install, pip, etc.) you can specify where data files and scripts go on Windows, and they don't have to be relative locations. So, absolute paths need to be supported, despite the existence of broken bdist targets on Windows.