> There is nothing binary in the archive
The archive is a binary file.  We tend to dislike those because we need to download and process them instead of just reading them in a browser tab, and in some cases (Windows .exe files) there are also security reasons.  It’s not a big deal anyway, just a small matter of convention.

> I use the standard pkg_resources way to do things:
setuptools is not in the standard library nor does it implements PEPs, so it’s at most a de facto standard.  More importantly, it is not developed by python-dev; could you report the bug to bugs.python.org/setuptools and bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute ?  If they find that the bug actually comes from distutils, then we’ll reopen this bug.  Thanks!