[Distutils] Best practices on distributing documentation and examples with eggs?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:55 PM 7/26/2007 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

>On Jul 26, 2007, at 11:52 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
>>There are a few different ways you could do this.  The easiest would
>>be to put a docs subdirectory either inside one of your packages or
>>inside your .egg-info directory, then use the pkg_resources resource
>>or metadata APIs to list and extract them.  One advantage to using
>>something like .egg-info/docs would be that this could perhaps be
>>recognized by some sort of "standard" tools in the future.
>
>I always thought .egg-info was just an artifact of the build.

No - it's also a place for metadata that doesn't live under a 
specific package directory.

>Recommending that things get put there means it should get version
>controlled.

Yep.


>   But I've found that occasionally I have to blow
>away .egg-info files to get 'setup.py develop' to work properly (i.e.
>like a 'make clean' step).

Really?  I'd consider that to be a bug.  Could you perhaps be more specific?

Note that if you are using a revision control system, and setuptools 
deletes a file from there, it might get restored by your revision 
control, and that could potentially be a problem unless you also 
manually delete the file.