[Distutils] distlib and data files => resources ?

[PJ Eby]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 3:18 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com>wrote:

>
> On 19 Nov, 2012, at 20:26, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Data files should never be installed to package directories.  But I'm
> not aware of any good reason why resource files should ever be installed
> anywhere *else*.
>
> To be (too) snarky: because the FHS says so.
>
Less snarky, Linux distributors try to keep simular files together (for
> example storing all gettext translations together in /usr/share/locale).
>  To play nice in such an enviroment Python packages would have to install
> resource files outside of the python package and into the FHS specified
> directory structure.


Consider the example of a web page template containing embedded Python
code.  Is that a data file containing code, or a code file containing
data?  Where does the FHS say it goes?

What if it's not embedded Python, but an embedded DSL interpreted by the
package it goes with?

What if it's not a page template, but a precompiled SQL grammar?  (Such as
was distributed with the "gadfly" package, many a year ago.)

These are the kind of files I mean by "resources".  If somebody wants to
support gettext or similar localization, then obviously they should declare
the files data -- or better yet, as part of an explicit localization
category.

The whole point of "resources" is that it's a catch-all for static data
that's more convenient to treat as a standalone source file than to inline
as a huge triple-quoted constant in a .py file.  ;-)
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