A slightly different patch is attached to issue7639, which generates short names more similar to Windows/NTFS:
 
http://bugs.python.org/file15898/msilib_make_short.diff

Here are some short names created with the msilib_make_short patch, which are identical to the short names created by the Windows NTFS file system:

foo.txt             ->  FOO.TXT
foo.2.txt           ->  FOO2~1.TXT
someLongName.txt    ->  SOMELO~1.TXT
someLongerName.txt  ->  SOMELO~2.TXT

For comparison, the msilib-2 patch generates these short names:

foo.txt             ->  FOO.TXT
foo.2.txt           ->  FOO.2.TXT    <- different from NTFS
someLongName.txt    ->  SOMELO~1.TXT
someLongerName.txt  ->  SOMELO~2.TXT