FWIW I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expand the categories we have, it might also let us do things like exclude some categories from being installed on systems they don’t make sense on. e.g. installing a man page on Windows probably doesn’t make very much sense, so we could just exclude it.



On Sep 14, 2018, at 12:36 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 17:05, Jeroen Demeyer <J.Demeyer@ugent.be> wrote:

On 2018-09-14 16:39, Paul Moore wrote:
My understanding (and I'm not an expert here, so hopefully someone
else will confirm or correct) is that yes, the data directory is
installed to "the installation root", which is $VIRTUAL_ENV for a
virtualenv, and "something else" for non-virtualenvs (I think it's /
on Unix and sys.prefix on Windows, no idea what happens for user
installs).

More precisely: it's always sys.prefix for non-user installs (which is
"/usr" not "/" on my system).

For user installs, it's site.USER_BASE which is "/home/jdemeyer/.local"
for me.

I think that this works great, I see nothing to fix here (except being
more explicit that absolute paths don't work).

And actually, https://packaging.python.org/guides/distributing-packages-using-setuptools/#data-files
is a reasonably clear explanation of the current behaviour (it doesn't
mention USER_BASE - patches accepted, I guess). So I guess you're
right, the behaviour is sufficient and documented. As usual,
discoverability and getting around the amount of out of date
information on the web is an issue, but that's not one that we can
really solve with anything other than time and discussions like these.

Paul
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