[Distutils] Recursive package data

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 01:25 PM 9/28/2005 -0700, Ben Bangert wrote:
> 
>>As I'm looking at setuptools to handle distribution and usage of web
>>application's, being able to package arbitrarily deep static content
>>that belongs with the webapp package (of various extension types)
>>starts cropping up. Having no way to just say, "everything under this
>>dir is package data, keep it" becomes a real killer in this context.
>>
>>I think I heard somewhere that this feature is being discussed/ 
>>implemented, when will it be available? (or is it not being developed?)
> 
> 
> I originally thought I could just slap in detection via revision control 
> metadata, but it turned out to be problematic.  Doing "sdist" this way is 
> not a problem, because the generated sdist doesn't need to know how its 
> contents were generated - you don't generally build another sdist from an 
> sdist.  But doing this for data files would mean the information used to 
> generate the list would be lost to source distributions, which would be 
> Very Bad, because you then couldn't generate a bdist_egg from an sdist.

Isn't that information in MANIFEST?  Couldn't every package that gets 
installed have every file under it that is also in MANIFEST be 
considered a package_data file?  Is there stuff people distribute that 
shouldn't be installed?  I guess tests might count (I personally have 
come to prefer keeping them outside of the packages, so it's not a problem).

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org