Issue 19286: error: can't copy '': doesn't exist or not a regular file (original) (raw)

On Python 2.7 and 3.3, if the package_data glob happens to match a directory, it will trigger this error during build:

error: can't copy '/': doesn't exist or not a regular file

It seems that package_data is not very smart about filtering out directories, and assumes every name matched in the glob is a file. This is particularly inconvenient when one has a directory structure of package data. Consider:

package_data={
    'bug_pkg': (
        [
            'html/*.*',
            'html/something-1.0/*.*',
        ]
    ),
},

with a directory structure of:

. │ setup.py │ └───bug_pkg │ init.py │ └───html │ index.html │ └───something-1.0 index.dat

Since 'html/.' matches 'something-1.0', distutils assumes something-1.0 is a file and tries to copy it and fails with:

error: can't copy 'bug_pkg/html/something-1.0': doesn't exist or not a regular file

I believe distutils should be filtering out folders from package_data. In the past, users (including myself) have worked around the issue by using '.' to match only files, but that's a poor heuristic is the above example demonstrates.

This issue was encountered when using sphinx-bootstrap-theme, which adds directories to sphinx HTML docs with directories like 'bootstrap-3.0.0', which are difficult to not match in a glob.

Is there any reason why globs specified in package_data should not exclude all directories?