[Python-Dev] what to do if you don't want your module in Debian (original) (raw)

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Tue Apr 27 02:43:49 CEST 2010

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Piotr Ożarowski <piotr at debian.org> wrote:

if there's no other way (--install-data is ignored right now, and I know you're doing a great work to change that, thanks BTW), one could always use it in one place and later import the result in other parts of the code (instead of using file again)

May I ask why this is not actually the solution to resources location ? For example, let's say we have (hypothetic version of distutils supporting autoconf paths):

python setup.py install --prefix=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/foo --manpath=/somefunkypath

Then the install step would generate a file __install_path.py such as:

PREFIX = "/usr" DATADIR = "/var/lib/foo" MANPATH = "/somfunkypath"

There remains then the problem of relocatable packages, but solving this would be easy through a conditional in this generated file:

if RELOCATABLE: PREFIX = "$prefix" ... else:

and define $prefix and co from file if necessary. All this would be an implementation detail, so that the package developer effectively do

from mypkg.file_paths import PREFIX, DATADIR, etc...

This is both simple and flexible: it is not mandatory, it does not make life more complicated for python developers who don't care about platform X. FWIW, that's the scheme I intend to support in my own packaging solution,

cheers,

David

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list