I am preparing next week’s sprint at Logilab, trying to isolate several interesting tasks people will be able to achieve without having to dig in the whole code base.

One task we need to achieve in Distutils2 is a better description of the data files in a project, and in particular a way to categorize them so an OS packager knows how to make a difference between a documentation file and a configuration file. Also, we need to let the packager decide where these files need to land in the system at installation time, without breaking the developer’s code.

So far in Python, people tend to include all files within their Python packages and access them using the __file__ variable:

import os.path here = os.path.dirname(__file__) images = os.path.join(here, 'images_dir')

This technique has its limits:

If you use easy_install to install your projects, you might end up with a zipped egg, meaning that the directory is in a zip file. So this code will not work unless you’ve installed the project with the -Z option, or you use the zipimport helper to work with your files.

Installing data files in site-packages is not a best practice in most Linux distributions, and if the OS packager wants to move them in the “right” place, he needs to review all the code and patch it everywhere it makes an assumption on the location of the file.

If the developer does the right thing for Debuntu with his data files, he’d need to do it for every other Linux distribution, but also define a specific behaviour for Mac OS X and Windows.

Last year at Pycon we’ve worked on that topic and came up with an elegant design on the paper:

Python will provide in the sysconfig module a list of default categories for data files, with a default location for each target system

The developer will define its data files in categories in setup.cfg, and add if needed new categories

Linux distributions will be able to change the paths for each categories via a configuration file global to Python — sysconfig.cfg

Distutils2 will look at the paths of each categories at installation time, and install the files there.

The developer will use a special open() API to be able to locate the file no matter on what system the code runs, or even if the code runs on a development tree.

The draft of this feature is here: http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst and starting to code this design for real is a perfect task for this sprint because it does not require a lot of knowledge about the Distutils2 code base.

If you are in Paris, or available online, and want to sprint with us, make sure you register to the wiki page !