virtualenv installation failes when TMPDIR is '.'

[Bill Hart]

I have discovered a problem installing virtualenv when the user's TMPDIR environment is set to '.' (the current directory). I get the following log file:

Searching for virtualenv
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/virtualenv/
Best match: virtualenv 1.4rc1
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.4rc1. tar.gz#md5=fb62a93b054e877e6a6c92f7dcd0b6ae
Processing virtualenv-1.4rc1.tar.gz
Running virtualenv-1.4rc1/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir ./easy_install-Q8xEi8/ virtualenv-1.4rc1/egg-dist-tmp-LpvoDf
error: ./easy_install-Q8xEi8/virtualenv-1.4rc1/docs/index.txt: No such file or directory

I suspect that this is a virtualenv-specific issue because I can successfully load and install other packages from pypi (e.g. nose).

[Carl Meyer (carljm)]

From my testing, this is not virtualenv-specific. I can't get anything to easy_install (including nose) when TMPDIR is set to ".".

Not migrating this to new tracker at https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues