Comment 21 for bug 383171

I can reproduce zzzeek's problem of the US/Eastern timezone being absent if I run easy_install on the tar.gz file. I think the underlying Distribute bug is https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/183/extracting-of-symlinks-looses-original. The original lines from the proposed patch https://bitbucket-assetroot.s3.amazonaws.com/tarek/distribute/20101013/183/tarfile-update.patch show that currently, tarfile members are only extracted if they're files or directories, not symlinks or hardlinks.

I just checked http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pytz/pytz-2011e.tar.gz and US/Eastern, America/New_York, and posixrules are links to the same file.

My workaround is to teach chef to untar with tar first, then do setup.py install. Rebuilding the tarfile with --hard-dereference might also work.