test that announcement.txt is pure ASCII... ...required at least up to python2.5 by distutils. (Note tht doc/announcement.txt is the *old* announcement from the last release, I've changed it so that setup.py will work for now and to illustrate what needed to be changed).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import zlib, base64, sys
print base64.encodestring(zlib.compress(sys.stdin.read()))