Hello, We worked during the Pycon sprint on PEP 376. The goal was to finish the section about the RECORD file syntax. This file contains the list of installed files when a project is installed using distutils (and distutils-based tools.) For all the files that are supposed to land in the Python tree on the system, like Python modules, it's pretty clear and simple. The fuzzy part in distutils has always been about resource files (configuration files, help files, etc.) that should land on specific locations on the target system if we want to be FHS-compliant. We ended up working on something bigger for that. We wanted to make it easier for developer to describe what their projects contain, and easier for OS packagers to place resources files of a project in the proper location. For instance, a ini-file in your Foo project, called foo.cfg, should land in /etc/ under Debian. From a developer point of view, the location of the file on the target system doesn't really matter as long as he can reach it somehow in its code. People that want a generic solution put that file in the source tree and use __file__ to find the path. That is not really robust and doesn't work if the source tree is in a zip file for instance. Setuptools provides an api for that, but the resource cannot be relocated on the system by the packagers. We worked on a solution to make life easier for developers and packagers. IOW, let the packager define the paths of the files on the system, and provide an API for the developer to get the file back. Proposal ------------ Here's the proposal : 1. A ``resources`` section in ``setup.cfg`` that maps resource files to their categories (and optionally subdirectory prefixes within those categories) 2. A ``sysconfig.cfg`` file at the system Python level that maps categories to a position on the filesystem 3. A simple ``pkgutil.open()`` API to access resources from code Please read the full detailed proposal here : http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst, and comment ! :) Calendar ------------ I am working on finishing some details at the end of the proposal, but the document is already readable (the unfinished parts are after the API section). If we can manage to finish the discussion on this in the upcoming weeks and get it accepted by Guido, we could include in 2.7 a sysconfig.cfg file that is used by the existing sysconfig.py APIs (right now it is using a python dict for the paths), and add APIs in pkgutil. If we finish this work too late, (which is most likely to be the case because 2.7b1 is due in a few weeks), we will add these APIs in distutils2 I guess, and see if we can add them in the next version of 3.x (or 2.8 ;) ) Regards, Tarek -- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org