I want setuptools to install a bunch of sample scripts in a package-relative directory. Each end user will later run a script that copies these to a directory relative to his or her home directory. However, strange things happen to data files that have a .py extension. 1) Saying "include_package_data = True" was not enough to get them included in the egg. The .txt files were included, but the .py files were magically excluded. 2) I overcame the above problem with the following setup parameter: package_data = { # Include all .py files in the data directories, they # are excluded by default. 'cpif.data': ['lander/*.py', 'samples/*.py'], } But now I get a bogus .pyc file generated for each of these sample scripts. These bogus .pyc files get included in the egg. 3) I tried to overcome problem #2 above with the following setup parameter: exclude_package_data = { # The example programs should not be shipped with .pyc files # XXX This is not working, the .pyc files are being created and # included anyway. 'cpif.data': ['lander/*.pyc', 'samples/*.pyc'], } But this didn't work. Putting the following lines in my MANIFEST.in file also didn't work: exclude cpif/data/lander/*.pyc exclude cpif/data/samples/*.pyc I suppose I could turn off .pyc file generation, but that's not what I want. I just want to treat certain .py files as data files. The "data" .py files are in a subdirectory of a python package, but the directory in which they directly reside does not contain an __init__.py file, so they are not directly importable. So I don't think .pyc files should be generated for them in any case. Thanks in advance for ideas/sympathy/fixes, etc. -- David Handy Computer Programming is Fun! Beginning Computer Programming with Python http://www.handysoftware.com/cpif/