[Distutils] Files under /etc and /usr/share

[Vincenzo Di Massa]

Hi,
It is some weeks I put easy-deb on http://easy-deb.sf.net.

I'm now considering improvements to make a new release.
I have two things in mind:
1) make easy-deb a setup command (now it is an external tool)
2) provide a way to put files into /etc

About point 2):
Is it possible to install things into /etc using setuptools/easy_install? I 
think that this feature will be very appreciated.
I know setup.py philosopy is to put everything inside eggs, but config files 
are a really special case!
It would be nice beeing able to tell in setup.py what the config files/dirs 
are. The generated egg should install the config files on user request (using 
a gen_config script) or just when the neded are not config files on the 
system.

Another idea is for heavy data. Consider for example moin_moin.
Using easy-deb i managed to aotomatically pacakge it into an egg (which is 
contained into a deb-package). The problem here is that it installs the 
template files inside the egg. Since template files must be copied "somewere" 
it is bat to put them into the egg where they are hidden/zipped. Moreover it 
would be nice to make the eggs inside /usr/lib/python?.?/site-packages more 
lightweight removing package data from them.
There are 2 kind of package data: data that is used *by* the module code and 
data that is used *with* the module. moinmoin is just an example of module 
whose data is not used by the code but with the code.
I have no idea how this could be done, but it would be good (IMHO).

Another nice thing to have in setuptools is a --nodeps option. Packagers 
really need to install an egg (into a package of course) even if its 
dependencies are not on the system. Skipped dependencies could be reported 
inside a skipped_deps.txt file or on stdout (so that packagers can add the 
dependency info to the generated packages).

Ciao
Vincenzo

		
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