David Lyon wrote: > On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:12:48 -0400, "P.J. Eby" <[email protected]> > wrote: >> The concept of "package data" is data in the same directory as the >> package's Python code. Using it to install libraries is a bit of a >> hack in the first place. > > Too right it's a hack - haha. I'm glad that I'm not the only one who's > noticed.
You're misreading him - the hack is using an attribute of "package_data", which is intended for describing "data files residing within a package directory", in a way in which it was not intended to describe data _outside_ a package directory. That's a definition of a hack. If an egg wants to splatter data files outside the Python package area, other than scripts in /usr/local/bin/, I'd consider that very bad behavior. My reasons are that (1) such splattering is usually very OS/platform-specific, (2) the files splattered may have overwritten files under the control of a native system packaging system, with no way to recover the originals and (3) there is no real metadata or directory proximity linking the splattered files to a particular Python distribution. These properties have a destabilizing effect on a system over time. > Now it's somewhat restrictive. And my guess + experience is that it > can take about 3+ days to get a "typical" setup.py to work properly > because of all the hacks. (For a newcomer) Setuptools is not the hack (by the definition of 'hack') -- using setuptools in unusual ways is the hack. Most often the problems I see people have are they do not grok the problem that setuptools is solving and want it to solve some other problem. When used for the purpose intended, setuptools is quite good. -Jeff _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
