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

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Jan 5 18:07:39 CET 2006


At 10:54 PM 1/4/2006 -0500, David Handy wrote:
>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.

If I understand your use case correctly, I don't see how that hurts anything.

The simplest way to solve your problem, however, is to put the samples in a 
subdirectory of your project's .egg-info directory, and then use the 
metadata APIs to access them.  .py files under .egg-info do not get compiled.

Meanwhile, it's not really practical to have .py files inside a package be 
included, but not compiled.  So your three choices are:

* Give the files a different extension (e.g. .py.orig or .py.in or .cfg or 
whatever), which will then trivially work with include_package_data=True

* Include them explicitly as .py files, as shown above (and then ignore the 
irrelevant .pyc files)

* Put them in a subdirectory of the project's .egg-info, and then use the 
pkg_resources metadata APIs at runtime to get access.



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