Previously, users of setuptools would get our data embedded in eggs.
Eggs are horrible things, but more importantly our package data should
be free, in a well-known albeit system-dependant path that is
independent of the package.
By specifying [install_data][1] as an alias of install, we assure that
our data (examples, integrations, etc) are placed in $data/share as
$DEITY intended.
Alternative suggestions included force-adding "--old-and-unmanageable",
which would invoke the distutils-style install command, but that had the
unfortunate side effect of turning off eggs and dependency resolution
altogether.
We could also use "--single-version-externally-managed", but I think
that was designed to be used by package managers, not by us.
In any case, both of the above were fragile and might break if the user
specified additional options to setup.py.
In closing, Python module management is horrible. See [this][2],
[this][3], and [this][4] for info about the status quo, and [this][5]
for information about crack to be smoked later down the road. Don't even
get me started about [PEP 427 -- Python wheels][6].
[1]: http://docs.python.org/2/distutils/commandref.html#install-data
[2]: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/22/hate-hate-hate-everywhere/
[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6522905/90777
[4]: http://python-notes.boredomandlaziness.org/en/latest/pep_ideas/core_packaging_api.html
[5]: https://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/future.html
[6]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/
(imported from commit 6cf1bd2b8f5a60b2f02f5d11094e4a41cc5e48aa)
Luke Faraone