[Python-Dev] magic in setuptools (Was: setuptools in the stdlib) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Apr 21 00:02:20 CEST 2006

At 11:26 PM 4/20/2006 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Greg Ewing wrote: >> The "resources" name is actually quite a common meme; > > I believe it goes back to the original Macintosh, which > was the first and only computer in the world to have files > with something called a "resource fork". The resource fork > contained pieces of data called "resources".

I can believe that history. Still, I thought a resource is something you can exhaust; the fork should have been named "data fork" or just "second fork".

I suspect that the distinction is that "data" sounds too much like something belonging to the user of the program, whereas "resources" can reasonably be construed to be something that belongs to the program itself.

By now, however, the term is popularly used with GUI toolkits of all kinds to mean essentially read-only data files that are required by a program or library to function, but which are not directly part of the code.

Interestingly enough, there is another "resource" tool for Python out there, that actually works by converting resource files to strings in .py files, so that you can then just import them.

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