2.6 Installing Additional Files
The data_files option can be used to specify additional files needed by the module distribution: configuration files, message catalogs, data files, anything which doesn't fit in the previous categories.
data_files specifies a sequence of (directory, files) pairs in the following way:
setup(...
data_files=[('bitmaps', ['bm/b1.gif', 'bm/b2.gif']),
('config', ['cfg/data.cfg']),
('/etc/init.d', ['init-script'])]
)
Note that you can specify the directory names where the data files will be installed, but you cannot rename the data files themselves.
Each (directory, files) pair in the sequence specifies the
installation directory and the files to install there. If
directory is a relative path, it is interpreted relative to the
installation prefix (Python's sys.prefix for pure-Python
packages, sys.exec_prefix for packages that contain extension
modules). Each file name in files is interpreted relative to
the setup.py script at the top of the package source
distribution. No directory information from files is used to
determine the final location of the installed file; only the name of
the file is used.
You can specify the data_files options as a simple sequence
of files without specifying a target directory, but this is not recommended,
and the install command will print a warning in this case.
To install data files directly in the target directory, an empty
string should be given as the directory.
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Distributing Python Modules |  |
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Release 2.4.4c1, documentation updated on 11 October 2006.