I mentioned this to dmalcolm as a possible bug on IRC and as I figured out what's going on I felt I should share with others that might run into this.

In python-2.7, an incompatibility was introduced in what is allowed to be in a setup.py file. A setup.py looks something like this::

#!/usr/bin/python -tt # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from distutils.core import setup

setup(name='test', version='1.0', description='Test', author='Toshio Kuratomi', author_email='toshio@fp.o', license='MIT', url='http://localhost/', download_url='http://localhost/', keywords='test', classifiers=[ 'Development Status :: 3 - Alpha', ], )

In python-2.7, the values of those entries to the setup function cannot be unicode strings. They must be byte strings (str type). This is true even if the value is all ASCII. For instance, this is invalid::

setup(name=u'test', [...]

Although this is a change in behaviour from earlier python versions, it is now a documented behaviour (see the notes section of this link: http://docs.python.org/distutils/setupscript.html#additional-meta-data ) so it's not a bug, it's a feature ;-)

-Toshio