[Distutils] [PEAK] Re: problem with EasyInstall 0.6a10 + pkg manager

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:53 AM 3/1/2006, Ronny Pfannschmidt wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
>>At 09:35 AM 3/1/2006, Ronny Pfannschmidt wrote:
>>
>>>With the latest version of EasyInstall i had a major problem with the
>>>"exhaustive testing of the install directory, including a spawn test for
>>>.pth file support"
>>>since my pkg manager uses `setup.py install --root=Dest` to install the
>>>pkg in a image directory, before installing it on the system.
>>>
>>>actually i work around this by creating the needed dirs and adding them
>>>to PYTHONPATH
>>>
>>>is there a nicer way too work with such pkg managers ?
>>
>>
>>Yes.  Use "setup.py install --single-version-externally-managed 
>>--root=Dest", which will do the installation in a way that's 
>>package manager friendly.
>>
>>I may change this at some point so that a --root (other than /) 
>>automatically triggers the other option, but at the moment I'm not 
>>sure whether that would interfere with anything else.
>i tried the option, and found several problems
>while the python modules where installed fine much of the other data 
>is thrown right into /usr (wich isnt very nice)
>
>as result the program (pida) was not working anymore ( while it 
>worked with the dirty workaround), since it was written for a egg 
>image, wich implies, that much of the data is in the root of the egg 
>image and usually the path can be resolved by the module path

Ah.  Don't do that.  If your packages have data, put them inside a 
package directory, and use the pkg_resources module APIs to access 
them.  Then your code will work no matter how it's installed.  I 
would go so far in fact as to say that you should *never* use the 
disutils' data files installation for constant data files that your 
program needs access to at runtime.  The "data files" option should 
be used only for example configuration files, documentation, etc.  If 
your packages need data, install it as package data.