Hi,

This is related to #12585.

Distutils sdist builds a package tree using hardlinks to the source if supported by the OS. This is then tarred/zipped/etc...

If the source contains symbolic links to external files:

On Linux (and apparently Solaris) they are not dereferenced and the resulting package is broken.

On OSX (and apparently all BSD kernels) a hardlink to a symlink will dereference the symlink first and the resulting tgz package is ok. However I would expect issue #8876 to be more likely as the symlink could references a different filesystem which would case hardlinking to fail.


In #12585 I assume that zip dereferences the symlinks which masks the issue.

distutils2 appears to always copy instead of hardlinking resolving all of these issues.

distutils can be monkey patched to do the same: 
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel/2078