Hey, I had already this bug and I also wrote a patch: copy_script-2.patch attached to #6011. It is very similar to build_scripts-binary_mode.patch (read the file in binary mode to avoid the encode/decode dance). But it checks also that the path to Python program is decodable from UTF-8 and from the script encoding.

Éric Araujo doesn't want to apply copy_script-2.patch on Python 3 before distutils2 is ported to Python 3 and included into Python (3.3): read msg124648. Five months later: distutils2 is not yet included to Python 3, the patch is not commited yet, and we have now a duplicate issue (and 3 patches for a single bug) :-)

This situation sucks. How can we move forward? What is the status of distutils2? Is it ported to Python3? Is it ready for an inclusion into Python3?

When distutils2 will be part of Python 3.3, should we fix distutils bugs or not? I suppose that few people use Python 3.3, maybe because it will not be released before August 2012 (PEP 398) :-) So users will continue to have this bug until everybody moves to 3.3 (or later)...

I think that we should fix this bug today. I don't really care of distutils2 today because it is not yet part of Python.