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gztar, ztar, tar, and zip appear to create the same install tree rooted at / . Only the compression differs. (I guess wininst is the intended way to create a Windows distribution.)
The Unix tree contains PythonX.X in its paths, so not only is the full tree NG for Windows, but if someone prepares a bdist package on a Unix system running 2.2, it appears that it is not going to install correctly on a Unix system running 2.1. It is impractical to ask developers to update their Tools distributions for each version of Python, so what to do?
It may be that the bdist paths should be rooted at site-packages, with script installation to prefix/bin. If there are extensions to go into lib-dynload, the path is ../lib-dynload from site-packages.
Then the user would unpack the file in the site-package directory. Note that right now the file names for source and 'binary' distribution are very similar, but the method of installation is different, and this has to be made clear to the user.
GvR seems to be interested in making the install trees the same on Linux and Windows, that would help.
Incidently, the distutils docs say the default is to install relative to prefix, but it appears that that has not been implemented, the default is / . Also, though the docs mention Windows installers, rpms, etc., they don't say anything about install files prepared with bdist. Maybe no one uses bdist?
If there is something I can do here, let me know. It seems it may take some discussion on python-dev first, though.