I fail to see the bug. gettext.find behaves as specified; if you want something else, don't use that function.

If you want to load a .mo file from a zip file, you should be able to create a GNUTranslation object directly, from a file-like object.

I don't think that gettext should support eggs directly. If you want it to do things other than loading from file systems, you should generalize that appropriately. One appropriate generalization could be the introduction of a directory-like object, where you can do .exists(relpath), and .open(relpath). However, introduction of directory-like objets is PEP material.

Reclassifying this as a feature request.