[Distutils] distlib and data files => resources ?

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 20, 2012, at 09:18 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:

>To be (too) snarky: because the FHS says so. 
>
>Less snarky, Linux distributors try to keep simular files together (for
>example storing all gettext translations together in /usr/share/locale).  To
>play nice in such an enviroment Python packages would have to install
>resource files outside of the python package and into the FHS specified
>directory structure.  That again would mean there needs to be an API to
>access such files because it is not always necessary to store resources
>separate from their python package and because the FHS linux specific.
>
>Storing resource files outside of packages directories seems to be only
>relevant for software that's packaged by a Linux distribution, not for python
>packages installed into a virtualenv or on other platforms.

We talked about this quite a bit a few Pycons ago.  This is where the idea of
categories of files came up, where you could designate certain files as
configuration files, documentation, etc.  Then there would be a default
mapping of these categories to locations.  virtualenv installations would use
one mapping, while distros could define a different mapping.  Linux distros
could probably share the FHS mapping for such categories.

I don't know whatever became of this, but I remember at time it seemed to
nicely solve our (i.e. Debian/Ubuntu, and IIRC Fedora/RH) needs.

Cheers,
-Barry