Sorry if I missed something obvious, but I have the following problem while using setuptools.setup for packaging: 1. My LICENSE.md file is in the repository root as well as the setup.py (because that is customary, and required so it shows up e.g. on GitHub properly) 2. My package is inside src/wobblui/ because I like having it cleanly separate in a subfolder 3. Because some of vendor code included that requires displaying of a notice (BSD/MIT license) and this is a UI library, I would like to offer a function that returns the text to display to make it easier for people to implement it. This function should be part of the package. This REQUIRES the contents of LICENSE.md, obviously 4. To complicate things, I have no second copy of LICENSE.md inside src/wobblui/ because then I would have to keep two flies in sync This has left me with a situation where I am really unsure what to do: I need LICENSE.md installed into site-packages inside the module folder to make this work (and it's not a huge file so that seemed like a reasonable solution), so I tried to use ../ in a package_data directive since the source file is outside of src/wobblui/. However, that seems to be completely ignored. data_files works, but of course is relative to a way more upwards location and I have no clue how to specify the exact path where the module/package actually was installed to, and it doesn't seem to be INTENDED for this purpose either. So how exactly am I supposed to package a file that is outside of the package folder like that, but should still be installed into the package/module folder?