[Distutils] PEP 376 - RECORD file / Data files + pip feedback ?

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

On 2010-02-05, at 4:57 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:

> At 04:49 PM 2/5/2010 -0800, Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:
>> Do we have a real-world example for installing uninstallable data files outside sys.prefix?
> 
> Scripts aren't always in sys.prefix,

Scripts *usually* go to sys.prefix/bin (or sys.prefix/Scripts or site.USER_BASE/Scripts). Are their packages that actually put them elsewhere?

> and some packages install fixed data (e.g. web pages, message catalogs, etc.) to /usr/share or some such.

This seems like a possible case. Does this only happen with Linux specific packages (eg: GNOME apps)?

> Also make sure you're not forgetting e.g. shared hosting scenarios without a virtualenv, unless you're planning to make virtualenvs an officially-supported thing.  In such cases, the paths involved won't necessarily fall into a single root.

PyPM is an ActivePython tool which installs itself into, say, /opt/ActivePython-2.6 - a single root directory. So we never had to worry about other layouts. PyPM supports virtualenvs too, so "pypm -E /tmp/myenv install lxml" would install into the specified virtualenv.

> Also don't forget sys.exec_prefix.  (Isn't packaging fun?)

In ActivePython, sys.exec_prefix == sys.prefix.

-srid