distutils and data files

[Robert Bossy]

Sam Peterson wrote:
> 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.
>   
This seems to be a classic distutils  question:  how a python module can 
access to data files *after* being installed?

The following thread addresses this issue:
    http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/163159

Carl Banks' solution seems to overcome the problem: his trick is to 
generate an additional configuration module with the relevant 
informations from the distutil data structure. However it is quite an 
old thread (2003) and I don't know if there has been progress made since 
then, maybe the distutils module now incorporates a similar mechanism.

Hope it helps,
RB