Hello, First - please forgive me - it's late here and I'm not functioning at my open-source best.
We (nipy.org) are just going over how to deal with data packaging. Our first and very simple draft was here: http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nibabel/data_pkg_design.html as you can see this is very crude, especially compared to datapkg. I'm afraid, that I haven't yet looked in detail at datapkg, for which, please forgive me, but I had a few preliminary questions: 1) I think our main usecase is being able to do something like this in our code: my_package_path = None try: import some_data_pkg_manager as excelsior except ImportError: hint = 'You need "some_data_pkg_manager", see http://a.helpful.url' else: version, pth = excelsior.have_local_pkg('my_package', version=0.3) if version >= 0.3: # well, you get what I mean my_package_path = pth else: hint = excelsior.installation_hint('my_package', version=0.3) if my_package_path is None: print hint else: # Do something with the data pass I hope you see what I mean. The main point is, we want to be able to query the local installations, whether system-wide or in the user space, to get where the data is, rather than automatically trying to pull the data down. This is because - I work in Cuba and bandwidth there is terrible - and - it seems like it would work better with standalone installations. I'm sure you've covered that - I just couldn't see it at a first glance. 2) The second thing was - on my (yes, I'm sorry) Mac, an attempt to do 'python setup.py develop' in the repository leads to a nasty set of error messages from setuptools, where it appears to be cycling over the Paste installation. It was complicated enough that it wasn't clear to me which installation target was causing the problems - certainly it seemed to occur with 'urlgrabber' - but I thought I'd let you know. 3) Related to same - one problem that we were trying to avoid with our crude setup was needing the data package installed in order to query the data. That is, we were hoping to have minimal run-time dependencies. datapkg has rather heavy dependencies - do you think there's any chance of a lightweight local query version, when not all the dependencies are met? We (as a group) have had some bad experiences with setuptools in the past. 4) Just lastly - I wonder if y'all have had time to look at bento: http://cournape.github.com/Bento/html/index.html It is our favorite hacker's attempt at a way out of distutils / setuptools hell - and he's very responsive to questions and suggestions. You can incorporate an entire distribution of bento as one file on your project to do the build for you. This was 300K at last count (David C the author made a bento file for nipy). This is moderately annoying for code, but nothing for a data package I would have thought. The idea (half formed) that I had would be that each data package would be responsible for its own installation - in our case through a setup.py file - but maybe instead through the bento build process. Sorry if this is off point or poorly thought out - I should point out that it's currently near 4 in the morning. See y'all, Matthew _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
