[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 20:28, Richard Jones wrote:
> It has a data_files option (see section 3.5 of the distutils manual) 
> which lists data files to install in subdirs of the install prefix. So 
> in Roundup, I specify things like:
> 
>      ('share/roundup/cgi-bin', ['cgi-bin/roundup.cgi'])
> 
> and
> 
>      ('man/man1', ['doc/roundup-admin.1',
>              'doc/roundup-mailgw.1', 'doc/roundup-server.1'])
> 
> Or were you thinking of something else?

I was thinking of something else.  Zope makes widespread use of data
files stored in Python packages.  It is probably the most convenient way
to associate a data file with code; you can access it by computing paths
relative to __file__ or __path__.  The recursive-include directive from
ZODB's MANIFEST.in should illustrate the point:
    recursive-include src *.h *.c *.xml *.txt *.sh *.conf *.bat

The first two are C extension source, of course.  The rest are various
kinds of data and scripts that are supposed to be installed with the
rest of the package in site-packages (or wherever else you choose to
install the code).  It takes at least 30 or 40 lines of code in a
setup.py to get those files installed where they belong.

The problem is easy to solve.  We just need some way to specify data
files that are associated with packages.  For Zope's use, I expect a
list of extensions that should be installed would suffice.

Jeremy