distutils and data files

[Sam Peterson]

I've been googling for a while now and cannot find a good way to deal
with this.

I have a slightly messy python program I wrote that I've historically
just run from the extracted source folder.  I have pictures and sound
files in this folder that this program uses.  I've always just used
the relative path names of these files in my program.

Lately, I had the idea of cleaning up my program and packaging it with
distutils, but I've been stuck on a good way to deal with these
resource files.  The package_data keyword seems to be the way to go,
but how can I locate and open my files once they've been moved?  In
other words, what should I do about changing the relative path names?
I need something that could work from both the extracted source
folder, AND when the program gets installed via the python setup.py
install command.
-- 
Sam Peterson
skpeterson At nospam ucdavis.edu
"if programmers were paid to remove code instead of adding it,
software would be much better" -- unknown