[Distutils] Recent buildout failure in Mailman 3

[P.J. Eby]

At 11:30 PM 10/8/2010 -0400, P.J. Eby wrote:
>(Preliminary guess: the tarfile module doesn't support relative 
>links, and thus needs some path fixup help from setuptools.)

That's the problem; the one use case I had for symlink extraction 
(NuPlone) has a correct linkname with a full path within the tarball; 
logilab-common's tarball just has a relative pathname within the 
subdirectory in the tarfile.

At this point, I'm a bit stumped, as I don't know enough about how 
tarballs are supposed to work internally; should I just whip up a 
patch for the situation where the path has no slashes in it (the 
logilab case), or do I need to do something more sophisticated in the 
general case?