Accessing files installed with distutils

[Thomas Heller]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> writes:

> timothy.williams at nvl.army.mil wrote:
>> I was wondering how to do this too. I'm trying to write a distutils
>> setup.py script that has some data I'd like to include.  From the
>> distutils docs I get
>> data_files specifies a sequence of (directory, files) pairs in the
>> following way:
>> setup(...
>>       data_files=[('bitmaps', ['bm/b1.gif', 'bm/b2.gif']),
>>                   ('config', ['cfg/data.cfg']),
>>                   ('/etc/init.d', ['init-script'])]
>>      )
>> I can use sys.prefix to find the top level where python is installed,
>> but this doesn't tell me specifically where site-packages is. On my
>> Linux box it is in
>> {sys.prefix}/lib/python2.3/site-packages
>> but on Windows, it's in
>> {sys.prefix}/Lib/site-packages.
>> Do I need to use sys.platform (along with sys.version) to check what
>> type of machine I'm on, or is there some better  method to get the
>> location of site-packages?
>>
> This is one of the areas where distutils could probably do with some
> improvement. I don;t know whether it's on any developers priority
> list, though.

There are some functions in distutils.sysconfig which may help.

Thomas