[Distutils] [setuptools] When .py files are "data", strange things happen

[David Handy]

I want setuptools to install a bunch of sample scripts in a package-relative
directory. Each end user will later run a script that copies these to a
directory relative to his or her home directory.

However, strange things happen to data files that have a .py extension.

1) Saying "include_package_data = True" was not enough to get them included
   in the egg. The .txt files were included, but the .py files were
   magically excluded.

2) I overcame the above problem with the following setup parameter:

        package_data = {
            # Include all .py files in the data directories, they
            # are excluded by default.
            'cpif.data': ['lander/*.py', 'samples/*.py'],
            }

   But now I get a bogus .pyc file generated for each of these sample
   scripts. These bogus .pyc files get included in the egg.

3) I tried to overcome problem #2 above with the following setup parameter:

        exclude_package_data = {
            # The example programs should not be shipped with .pyc files
            # XXX This is not working, the .pyc files are being created and
            # included anyway.
            'cpif.data': ['lander/*.pyc', 'samples/*.pyc'],
            }

   But this didn't work. Putting the following lines in my MANIFEST.in file
   also didn't work:

            exclude cpif/data/lander/*.pyc
            exclude cpif/data/samples/*.pyc

I suppose I could turn off .pyc file generation, but that's not what I want.
I just want to treat certain .py files as data files. The "data" .py files
are in a subdirectory of a python package, but the directory in which they
directly reside does not contain an __init__.py file, so they are not
directly importable. So I don't think .pyc files should be generated for
them in any case.

Thanks in advance for ideas/sympathy/fixes, etc.

-- 
David Handy
Computer Programming is Fun!
Beginning Computer Programming with Python
http://www.handysoftware.com/cpif/