As discussed with tarek. It shouldn't be up to distutils2 to decide whether or not a Python file that has been included in the package should be installed or not if it is included in the set of files the developer has *asked* to be installed.

Possible use cases include deliberately broken modules for testing or an ast-transformer import hook that works with otherwise-invalid syntax files. (e.g. transforming the with statement to work on Python 2.4)

Allowing for the install of invalid syntax files will require ignoring SyntaxErrors during bytecode compile phase. A --strict option could be provided to allow these to remain an error.