here is a patch against http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk

it moves the return statements into the individual file copying sections, and takes the final call to _copy_file_contents() out of the else. this allows an error in hardlinking to fall through by passing the exception.

i have only tested on Linux.

when running it still prints out
"hard linking CHANGES -> pyzgoubi-0.4dev"
because of how the message is generated in line 130. do you think this needs to be changed. do we need a
"hardlinking failed, falling back to copy"
message? it might cause unnecessary worry (distutils already suppresses tracebacks to avoid scaring non-python-programmers).

i have a patch that applies to 2.6 as well, is there much chance of that being accepted?