[Distutils] easy_install error

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:34 PM 4/22/2008 -0600, Michael Hearne wrote:
>I just tried to install the egg for Pyx, and got the error pasted 
>below.  I've contacted the mailing list for that project, and they 
>seem to be unsure of where they can put shared data for their egg.

Eggs do not have shared data -- they only have runtime-accessible 
data, because they're not a distribution format in the way that 
system packages are.

However, the problem in this case is that PyX isn't using any of the 
standard distutils ways to install these files.  If they were using 
the standard install_data command, the data would at least be shipped 
inside the egg.

If they were using the package_data facility, however (which 
available in Python 2.4 and up), they would be able to include the 
files inside their package (and thus the egg) and be able to access 
them using either __file__-relative paths or the pkg_resources API.

Any of these approaches would work, and unless they need to support 
Python 2.3, would probably be easier to use than their current method 
of creating a siteconfig.py file.  Their setup.py would then not need 
to include any custom distutils commands, as it does now.

(And such a change would not require any reliance on setuptools, either.)