Hi Greg, thanks for the quick response!
On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 22:01:49 -0500
"Greg Ward"
On 23 February 2000, Brian Takashi Hooper said:
I was wondering what the convention is for including binary data files with the installation of a module. Like say I had a table called table.data, that I wanted to have be installed with everything else on python setup.py install - should the data file be part of install_py, or install_ext, or something else?
Convention? There is no convention! Distutils currently handles the installation of precisely two types of files: pure Python modules and Python extension modules. Anything else and you're on your own. Are there any plans to include additional hooks for other stuff? Another one that I can think of is documentation - is that typically built as part of the install_ext portion...? What are other people doing with this?
I suppose adding the data file install to 'install' would be all right - it seems like it would be nicer though to be able to have install still just be the sum of its component targets (install_py and install_ext)... (or is that not the way it works?)
The good news is, the system is extensible: it's not too hard to augment the standard "install" command to handle whatever type of file interests you. See the NumPy setup script distributed with recent versions of NumPy for an example; visit this charming URL to see it directly:
Anyways, what is the nature of this data file? Is it platform-neutral? Does it have anything to do with Python, or is it just an artifact of your project? Under Unix, /usr/share/<your-project> or /usr/lib/<your-project> would probably be good places for it (depending on whether it's platform-neutral or not).
It is a platform-neutral data file - specifically, a character mapping table (this is for a Japanese encoding package that a colleague of mine is currently working on)... I guess this would be /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib then? Thanks, --Brian Hoopeer