I really appreciate the ease that the distutils make distributing Python modules. However, I have a question about using them to distribute non-Python (i.e. text) data files that support Python modules. Currently when I have data of this type, I parse it into python objects and make a python module from it. In other words, given a data file like
% cat grocery_list.txt eggs spam cheese I would make a data structure like grocery_list = ['eggs', 'spam', 'cheese'] which can be easily imported from a python file, and which the distutils installation programs make it easy for me to find on the Python path. Of course, the data I'm using is much more complex than this, but you get the idea. I'm starting to feel like this is a Bad Thing, because if the data file is distributed as a plain text file (e.g. data values in columns), I'm putting a barrier to updating the data if I have to parse a new file into Python. But I don't know whether there is a better way to include a file like 'grocery_list.txt' in my python distutils-distributed module so that I can get it from my other python modules? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
