At 06:11 PM 10/18/2006, Steven Bird wrote:

Hi,

I'm leading the development of NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, a suite of Python modules for analyzing text [http://nltk.sourceforge.net/]. I'm strugging to work out how to switch from distutils to setuptools, and am wondering if there's someone out there who can work with me to do the migration.

There are several components to the distribution: * a dozen pure python packages * a dependency on numpy * a dependency on elementtree for Python < 2.5 * textbook pdfs to be installed centrally * 200Mb of data (uncompressed) to be installed centrally

The above are relatively easy; just put the data and docs inside of your package directories, add install_package_data=True and install_requires=['numpy','elementtree'] (more or less) and import everything from setuptools instead of distutils.core.

* similar amount of data to be generated at install time and stored centrally ("models") * directory tree to be stored to user filespace (code samples from the textbook)

These two aren't currently supported. The closest you can get is to include scripts that users can run to generate, install, copy, etc., as eggs are simply installed as-is under normal circumstances, and to a single location.

* locations of all data to be discovered at run-time by the toolkit

Use the pkg_resources API calls to do this, and you're set.