[Distutils] test resources with setup tools

[P.J. Eby]

At 08:52 PM 4/26/2010 +0200, Manlio Perillo wrote:
>However, I would like to put the data in a *sub* project, that is know
>only to my project setup.  Unfortunately this seems to not be possible.
>
>Creating a "public" project for this does not feel right, to me.

In that case, why not just ship the data with the source distribution?


>Supposing that in the other PyPI project I still want to use a shell
>script to download and process the data, is it correct to execute the
>script in the setup.py script, before the setup function is called?

No.  Otherwise, this code will run even if somebody tries to do 
setup.py --help or build, say, a source distribution.  The only safe 
way to extend a setup script's behavior is by subclassing distutils 
commnads to perform the actions.


>Since the shell script depends on some executables to be available on
>the system (wget, tar, bzip2, imagemagick), is there a standard method
>to check for existence of system executables in the setup?

Distutils has some functions for this sort of thing; I think they're 
in distutils.util.