[Distutils] Data files and --prefix question.

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:43 PM 12/4/2006 +0000, José Rui Faustino de Sousa wrote:
>Hi! I am writing a package installation using distutils it is very nice 
>but I have it two snags: setup(...     data_files=[("foo",["*.data"])],\ 
>...) setup.py install --prefix=<prefix> a) Shouldn't the *.data syntax 
>work for data_files as it does for package_data?

Perhaps.  But data_files was a distutils option, and package_data was 
actually created in setuptools, which generally has options that are more 
"do-what-I-mean"ish than options that are native to the distutils.  :)


>  b) Why does it install the data files on <prefix>/foo and not in 
> <prefix>/share/foo like the documentation seems to imply? Everything else 
> seems to work as advertised scripts go to <prefix>/bin packages to 
> <prefix>/lib/python2.4/site-packages... Is it me or is it a bug?

I don't know.  Personally I prefer to avoid data_files and use package_data 
instead, since that allows the package to access data at runtime, the data 
can be safely shipped in eggs, etc.