[Distutils] setuptools bug: broken simlinks break setup()

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:43 AM 6/26/2007 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:

>This is an ongoing problem for me with emacs, which intentionally
>uses broken links to implement lock files.  Arguably, this is emacs'
>fault, but I'd love to see a change to setuptools that made it ignore
>broken links.
>
>Jim

Actually, as it turns out, it's distutils fault (well, the error is, anyway):

$ DISTUTILS_DEBUG=y python2.3 setup.py develop
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
   ...
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/distutils/filelist.py", line 48, in findall
     self.allfiles = findall(dir)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.3/distutils/filelist.py", line 298, in findall
     stat = os.stat(fullname)
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'broken.symlink'

I'll add a workaround in setuptools, but somebody should fix the 
distutils, too.    It looks like the 'findall()' function should be 
reimplemented with 'os.walk()'.