[Distutils] including an empty directory

[zooko]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 3:05 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

> Well if that's a recurrent need maybe we can add this feature.
>
> What about a new option called "include_empty_folders" (False by  
> default)


In a related story, I recently found a problem with the packaging of  
nevow.  We had earlier added "twisted.plugins" to "packages", not  
because nevow includes a package named "twisted.plugins", but because  
that's the only way we could figure out how to make sure that  
distutils and/or setuptools would create the empty "twisted/plugins"  
directory on installation which nevow requires:

http://divmod.org/trac/changeset/16896

However, this leads to this warning message at import time:

"/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/zope/__init__.py:19: UserWarning:  
Module twisted was already imported from /usr/lib/python2.5/site- 
packages/twisted/__init__.pyc, but /home/buildslave/slave-gutsy-tahoe/ 
gutsy/build/support/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Nevow-0.9.32- 
py2.5.egg is being added to sys.path"

http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue36

So I've just submitted a patch to nevow to use data_files instead of  
packages to indicate that this directory should be created, and to do  
that we have to include a file in the directory so that distutils  
doesn't prune it out for being an empty directory:

http://divmod.org/trac/ticket/2830

One thing that I don't understand about all this is why setuptools's  
"include_package_data=True" didn't cause the directory to be  
installed.  I'm not sure if calling that "twisted/plugins" directory  
a "data file" or an "included package data" makes more sense, but the  
former currently works.

Regards,

Zooko
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