[Distutils] Distutils confusion - please give me a hand

[Donn Ingle]

> While waiting, use your time constructively with the time-honoured
> debugging technique of "make the simplest example that shows the
> problem".
I'd thought my post was mostly doing that already - not runnable, but not
vague. 

Do you mean, given it's contents, that the error I get is an unusual one? If
so, then I'd have to hack an example. If not, then I'm hoping for some
quick expert advice for 'housing' directory trees full of data under the
package or Distribution-root directories.

 I have spent too many hours trying to get distutils to 'see' my tree and I
have actually run out of dev-time for my project now.

\d