distutils, cygwin, 'not a regular file'

[Thomas Jollans]

On Wednesday 15 September 2010, it occurred to Paul Watson to exclaim:
> So, what is not a regular file about this?  Is there any way to find out
> which files are being considered irregular?

Regular files are the kind of files used to store bytes. Other kinds of files 
you might find in a file system include:

directories
symbolic links
pipes (FIFOs)
sockets (UNIX/LOCAL domain)
character devices
block devices

Also, for help on interpreting the message at hand, see Lawrence d'Oliveiro's 
response.

> 
> $ uname -a
> CYGWIN_NT-6.0-WOW64 pwatson 1.7.7(0.230/5/3) 2010-08-31 09:58 i686 Cygwin
> 
> $ cat setup.py
> 
> from distutils.core import setup
> 
> setup(
>      name='xlsexport',
>      version='0.3',
> 
>      py_modules=['xlsexport']
>      )
> 20:47 pwatson [ pwatson:/cygdrive/c/Users/pwatson/bin/xlsexport] 12
> $ python setup.py sdist
> running sdist
> warning: sdist: missing required meta-data: url
> warning: sdist: missing meta-data: either (author and author_email) or
> (maintainer and maintainer_email) must be supplied
> reading manifest file 'MANIFEST'
> creating xlsexport-0.3
> making hard links in xlsexport-0.3...
> ' not a regular file -- skipping
> ' not a regular file -- skipping
> ' not a regular file -- skipping
> tar -cf dist/xlsexport-0.3.tar xlsexport-0.3
> gzip -f9 dist/xlsexport-0.3.tar
> removing 'xlsexport-0.3' (and everything under it)