[Distutils] Packages that have problems being installed from wheels

[Paul Moore]

On 28 August 2014 21:33, Joost Molenaar <j.j.molenaar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Question; would it help to use pkg_resources, or being able to specify locations
> relative to the python interpreter prefix?

Generally, I'd recommend putting resource files in the package
directory and reading them via pkgutil.get_data (from the stdlib). The
advantage of that is that it supports non-filesystem importers (such
as zipfiles). pkg_resources lets you be a bit more flexible but at the
cost of a runtime dependency on setuptools (which I personally find
unacceptable, but YMMV). For projects that don't mind failing when run
from anything other than the filesystem, you can use package.__file__
to get the filesystem location of your package and work from there -
but that's zipfile-hostile and won't work with tools like
cx_Freeze/py2exe/bbfreeze.

If you are willing to restrict your code to only working when
installed to the actual filesystem, you could also use
sysconfig.get_path(name) to get the filesystem location of the various
distutils locations (name='data' is where data_files are located, for
example) and use that to locate your files. I'm not entirely sure why
this would be better than using pkgutil, though.

The key thing is to *not* try to force your data files into a fixed
location that you then hard-code in your application.

Paul