I am trying to figure out the intended behaviour of dealing with
symlinks in package sources. My use case is that I have a number of
package implementation web things, and they tend to have an interactive
(static) prototype parts of which are reused directly in the
application. The filesystem structure for those packages is one of two
options:
1. Prototype is at the toplevel of the source. For example:
Prototype/index.html
Prototyle/style/main.css
setup.py
MANIFEST.in
src/namespace/__init__.py
src/namespace/templates/index.html
src/namespace/templates/style -> ../../../Prototype/style
2. Prototype is at outside the source. For example:
Prototype/index.html
Prototyle/style/main.css
buildout/bootstrap.py
buildout/buildout.cfg
buildout/src/mypackage/setup.py
buildout/src/mypackage/MANIFEST.in
buildout/src/mypackage/src/namespace/__init__.py
buildout/src/mypackage/src/namespace/templates/index.html
buildout/src/mypackage/src/namespace/templates/style ->
../../../../../../Prototype/style
My goal is to be able to create an sdist for my package and upload that
to pypi, and when people install that namespace/templates/style/main.css
must exist. Currently this does not appear to be possible. The problems
I see are:
a) symlinks are skipped by distutils
b) if you use a file finder plugin which traverses the symlink and
reports the files they end up twice in the sdist: once for the
Prototype and once inside the package. They second one is stored
as a link inside the sdist, but that link is not unpacked when
installing from the sdist and the files go missing.
Trying to analyse things a bit I see a number of possible scenarios for
symlinks:
i) symlink pointing to file inside the packgage
ii) symlink pointing to directory inside the packgage
iii) symlink pointing to file outside the packgage, but in SCM
iv) symlink pointing to directory outside the packgage, but in SCM
v) symlink pointing to something outside package and not managed by SCM
My expectation is that i and ii work out of the box, iii and iv should
work if you have a file finder plugin for setuptools that traverses the
symlink, and v to not work. Is that expectation reasonable?
Wichert.
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