packaging data that can't be distributed as part of a Debian package

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@faheem.info>]

Hi,

I have a situation where I have some software I want to package for 
Debian. This software needs to use some biological data, but I was told by 
the website I got this data from that I could not redistribute it.

So, I suppose anyone using the software needs to download it. I'll provide 
a script to download the data, but if I want to build a Debian package 
containing that data, how should I do it?

Let's say I have the software source directory with a script in it which 
downloads the data files to a specific directory. When should this 
download happen? Should the user do it manually?

One possibility seems to be to use the get-orig-source target to download 
it, but I don't see a clean way to do this.

I construct the orig.tar.gz tarball from the upstream repository, and the 
data isn't part of that repository. Downloading the data separately from 
the repository as part of the get-orig-source script also does not seem 
like the right thing to do, since it is also not in the source directory.

I still don't have a license for those data files, but is that Ok if the 
package does not distribute it?

The response I got when asking for license information was

    IMGT ® data are publicly available on the IMGT® web site for academics
    for their own research, but they are not redistributed by users.

                                                           Regards, Faheem