[Distutils] setup tools maximum recursion depth exceeded

[A. Cavallo]

There's been a previous post (Tarek, "Fixing the mess in sdist/egg_info") 
about the fact that setuptools fails due to a circular dependency:

distutils.sdist.run() -> setuptools.build_py.data_files ->
setuptools.egg_info.run() -> distutils.sdist.add_defaults() ->
setuptools.build_py.data_files -> etc

Actually I'm working packaging sphinx and it fails for this reason. Has 
anything moved to fix this problem? 

Regards,
Antonio