On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ta...@ziade.org> wrote: > If you are a packager for a project, you can describe in details your data > files, and add more metadata that are understood by PyPI. > > If you are a debian packager, you will be able to define where the data > files of a python project should be installed without having to patch some > python code.
This right here is the killer feature for me. By my limited observations, most people solve the data files problem either by dumping their data files inside their python modules (which is an ugly abuse of the filesystem), or are simply using the cumbersome autotools in order to record the installation prefix for their data files. It blows my mind that it is standard practice for many GNOME apps written in Python to use a C compilation preprocessor in order to set a python variable so their python scripts can find their data files. Currently I am hacking distutils in order to accomplish this, like so: https://github.com/robru/gottengeography/blob/master/setup.py But this is ugly because it modifies the file in-place, so I always have to be careful not to accidentally commit the munged file into my git repo. It's absolutely critical that any replacement for distutils have built-in functionality for installed python code being able to query at run-time the location that data files were placed at install time. -- http://exolucere.ca _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
