Distribution issues

[D-Man]

I am currently working with a Java environment and have found some
rather nice features.  Jar files (Java ARchive) store all your .class
(bytecode) files in one file.  The JVM knows how to look in the jar
and locate the packages and classes.  In addition, you can store your
icons, help documents, internationalization files (ie Properties-Java or
.po-C, GNU gettext) and locate them on any system very easily.

To distribute, you simply jar your files together and ship it.  The
user still needs a JVM, but that isn't a big issue (to me).  (Jar is
very similar to tar or zip)

Is there a similar thing for python?  Would it be useful to create
such a thing?  How to pythoneers solve the problem of locating
resources in a cross-platform way?  (Ie, can't always look in
/usr/share/myapp/ or C:\Program Files\My App , etc.)  One solution
might be to have a config file somewhere that provides the location of
other resources.  This is also a problem because the location of the
config isn't known  (might not be in /etc or c:\windows).

-D