I tried using the --install-script hook of the bdist_rpm command to update the INSTALLED_FILES listing to wrap them in quotes, but that doesn't help: http://paste.jaraco.com/uNMrQ

I also delved into the RPM docs, which don't provide any guidance other than to put one file per line.

I now believe that this is a bug in RPM and there's nothing that can be done in distutils to work around the issue.