On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 8:35 PM, Tim Smith <tim@tim-smith.us> wrote:

As a Homebrew maintainer this sounds like something that Homebrew
could influence. Are there any packages in the wild that use this
mechanism? It seems that headers are mostly installed beneath
site-packages. I don't have strong feelings about whether Homebrew
should have better support for install_headers or whether that would
be straightforward to implement but IIRC we've had no prior reports of
this causing trouble.

Thanks,
Tim

Thanks Tim, 

The OS X python install is the only one I know of where headers installed with the install_headers command are not placed in a subdirectory of `sys.config('include')`. Besides, `pip.locations.distutils_scheme` returns the right include directory even in the case of homebrew.

My point here was that this pip.locations function should probably be a feature of distutils itself. Although I would probably not have discovered the need for it if homebrew was placing extra headers in the same place as everyone else !

I don't think that using the package_data to place headers under site-package is the right thing to do in general. Then you need to rely on some python function to return the include directory...

Sylvain