Installing platform-independent resources outside the Python package (was: Specifying ‘--install-data’ for each binary package)

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:

> In that case, I currently have no good solution. I had hoped to use
> some Python standard-library resource access function to find the
> files wherever they are installed.

I have hacked a work-around:

* Patch the ‘MANIFEST.in’ and ‘setup.py’ to omit all mention of the
  resource files. This makes the Python Distutils simply omit the
  resource files and not install them at all.

* Add a series of rules to ‘debian/rules’ to explicitly install the resource
  files to ‘debian/resources/’. Make sure these rules work for the
  multiple binary packages and for multiple builds.

* Use ‘<packagename>.install’ to install the resource files for each
  package to ‘usr/share/<packagename>/’.

* Use ‘<packagename>.links’ to make a symlink for each package to
  ‘usr/share/<packagename>/foofile’ at
  ‘usr/lib/python${PYTHON_VERSION}/dist-packages/${DISTRIBUTION_NAME}/foofile’.

That works for now. It's ugly and a maintenance burden, though: I would
hate to need to do this for resource files in every Python package.

> Currently the upstream Python code uses ‘os.path.dirname(__file__)’
> and the like to discover the location of the data files. It thereby
> assumes that the package data is installed to the same location as the
> Python code.

I'm still open to a better solution, that allows a Python application to
find resource files in a FHS-compliant location specified at install time.

-- 
 \       “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I |
  `\        was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.” |
_o__)                                                    —Groucho Marx |
Ben Finney