Packaging data in a single-module distribution

[ericzolf]

Hi,

I'm trying to mimic https://github.com/dougn/coverage_pth (abandonware) without the complexity of its setup.py, but I'm failing, the file coverage.pth is included in the sdist but never in the wheel.

I've tried multiple parameters in pyproject.toml and structures, with and without src, with and without MANIFEST.in, etc but no avail.

My latest try is available at https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/pull/952/files

I would interpret coverage.pth as a data file in the "root" package, but setuptools seems to have a different interpretation 🤷

[abravalheri]

Files that are not contained by a package folder are not considered package data (they are outside of any package after all).

To add a .pth file to a wheel it is necessary to customise the build steps (probably bdist_wheel and/or build_py, maybe others...).
That is done via setup.py. Reminder that setup.py is a perfect valid, non-deprecated¹, configuration/customisation file that can be used alongside/complementary to pyproject.toml.

Footnotes

1. The only thing that is deprecated is running this file as a CLI tool. ↩

[ericzolf]

I had hoped for a declarative approach to the issue, but fair enough, I'll find an alternative. Actually, I think I'll go back to my scripted approach, finding the first writable directory in sys.path to drop the pth file (resp. use the site module to do something similar).