[Distutils] unpacking files from and egg only for testing

[Alexander Schmolck]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a package <http://www.scipy.org/MlabWrap> making the
move from distutils to setuptools and I've got the following problem: although
the code itself should work fine out of an egg, testing requires some a
directory with some files to be created for matlab. Since it's only needed for
testing I don't want to clutter the installers HD.

How should I best handle this? Currently I'm just using ``zip_safe=False``,
but a more elegant solution would seem to be for the test-code to temporarily
unpack the relevant files from the egg into some temp-dir run the tests and
delete the temp files again. I figure other projects might face a similar
situation and I was wondering if some good solution is already available, or
if I just should hack something together.


cheers

'as