[Distutils] Clarifying the meaning of the sysconfig "data" directory

[Marcus Smith]

actually, bdist_wheel doesn't handle absolute paths in the "data_files"
keyword like standard setuptools installs do, which honor it as absolute
(which seems to match the examples in the distutils docs)
when using absolute paths, the data ends up in the packaged wheel at the
top level (not in the {distribution}-{version}.data folder).
And get's installed relative to site-packages (along with the project
packages)

so, bdist_wheel is re-interpreting distutil's "data_files" differently.
maybe better for wheel to fail to build projects with absolute data_files,
than to just reinterpret it like that.






On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> As part of the docs clarification, I was planning to point out that such
>> layouts are almost always platform (and even distro) specific. That's still
>> a valid use case for sdist and wheel, though, so it makes sense to me to
>> document it properly.
>>
>> My other related question is whether it's possible to force bdist_wheel
>> to include the platform tag as part of the build process, since such wheels
>> *should* be flagged as platform specific.
>>
> that would be nice at least for absolute paths (like "/etc"), or relative
> paths that go up the folder hierarchy into who knows where.
> for non-upward relative paths, it's less clear whether it should be marked
> platform specific
>
>
>
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