I discovered a quite serious bug in wheels ( http://bugs.python.org/issue27317) When specifying an empty list for the list of data_files in a given directory, the entire directory is being deleted on uninstall of the wheel, even if it contained other resources from other pacakges. Example: from setuptools import setup
setup(name='remover', data_files=[('share/plugins', [])])
The expected behavior is that only the specified list of files is removed, (which is empty in that case). When the list is not empty, the behavior is the one expected. For example, from setuptools import setup
setup(name='remover', data_files=[('share/plugins', ['foobar.json'])])
will only remove `foobar.json` on uninstall and the `plugins` directory will not be removed if it is not empty. Thanks, Sylvain