On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 16:03, Daniel Holth
It can be hard to predict where data went at runtime.
I don't think it's "hard to predict". I *do* think it's badly documented/not standardised. See my previous note - pip installs into the install_data location that setuptools/distutils chooses. Ideally: a) Setuptools and/or distutils would document where that is clearly and in an easy to find location. b) There should be a standard defining "schemes" like this so that the choices aren't implementation-defined (by pip, setuptools and distutils in some weird combination). Of course "there should be..." means "someone who cares enough needs to invest time in..." :-(
Maybe we could record its path in .dist-info during the install. I think it may also not be clear how to put files into wheel's data directory from setup.py.
Better would be to have a supported library that exposes the logic pip uses (or as I said above, the standard-defined logic) to determine such paths. See https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5191
If we added more categories it would allow the installer to override e.g. just the config directory rather than copying a Unix-like tree under data/ onto the install path.
That's a reasonable but somewhat unrelated suggestion. I don't think it's needed for the OP's use case, but it may well be helpful for others. Paul