[Distutils] Strange warnings from package_index?

[Erik Bray]

Hello,

A user of one of my packages came to me the other day with a strange
problem that I've never seen before, and have thus far been unable to
reproduce.  I was wondering if anyone here had any idea about it.
When he runs setup.py build on my package, it immediately outputs:

$ python setup.py build
Not found: /institute/software_hardware/pyraf/favicon.ico
Not found: /resources/styles/style.css
Not found: /resources/styles/IEstyle.css
Not found: /resources/styles/print.css
Not found: /resources/styles/mobile.css
Not found: /institute/software_hardware/pyraf/localStyle.css
Not found: /institute/software_hardware/pyraf/software_hardware
Not found: /institute/employment
Not found: /jwst
Not found: /institute/newsletter
Not found: /institute/annual-reports
Not found: /institute/atlast
Not found: /institute/sd
Not found: /institute/Copyright
Not found: /institute/help.html
...

Followed by the normal build output, which proceeds without any other problems.

All those paths are paths on my company's website.  This package has a
setup_requires dependency which in turn contains

dependency_links=['http://stsdas.stsci.edu/download/packages']

in its setup.py, where http://stsda.stsci.edu/download/packages is a
local package repository we have for some of our dependencies.

It looks like what's happening is that the PackageIndex is finding
links on the site *above* the root of the package index, and then
searching for local files with the same path?  As I understand the
PackageIndex code shouldn't follow links that go above the root of the
package index site.  So I don't know why it's doing this, and can't
reproduce the behavior.

For what it's worth, the user has distribute installed (though I'm
waiting to find out what version), and is using Python 3.2.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Erik