Only some extensions fully unpacking on boot

[cthrax]

First off, this may be the wrong forum, but none of them quite seemed to fit problem perfectly, so please move if needed.

Specs:
Core liveCD 4.x line (due to extensions needed, I can't up to 5.x yet)
Running in VirtualBox

I have a custom ISO I'm using to boot tinycore that packages up a bunch of extensions into a gzip file that is loaded by initrd into /tmp/builtin/optional with an onboot.lst.

This appears to work for most of the extensions, however, python and python_setuptools are behaving strangely. ab thinks that these extensions are installed, and in fact the extensions are there and even mostly unpacked to /usr/local/share/python and /usr/local/share/python_setuptool respectively. However, python_setuptools has all of the binaries just dumped in that folder and not copied to /usr/local/bin like they should be and python has a files folder which contains a files.tar.gz.

If I manually unpack the files.tar.gz, copy the resulting files to /usr/local/bin and copy the setup_tools files to /usr/local/bin it works fine, but I'm curious why this is happening.

I thought maybe I was running out of loopback devices or something, so I put the max_loops=255, as suggested in the FAQ and it made no difference, I have checked the extension itself and it will install file individually, it just doesn't seem to unpack correctly onboot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[gerald_clark]

how much memory do you have?

[cthrax]

I upped it to 1024 without seeing a difference, the total size of the packages are under 200MB.