## page was renamed from DistutilsAutoPackageDiscovery
= Problem =

Distutils requires that you manually specify each package to be included in the distribution.  For packages with large and deep sub-package hierarchies it can be a pain to keep this list in sync with the code, particularly as forgetting an entry is not noticable until a user happens to report that an entire sub-package is missing.

= Solution =

Use an automatic sub-package scanning mechanism to generate the package_dir and packages parameters for setup:

{{{
import os

def is_package(path):
    return (
        os.path.isdir(path) and
        os.path.isfile(os.path.join(path, '__init__.py'))
        )

def find_packages(path, base="" ):
    """ Find all packages in path """
    packages = {}
    for item in os.listdir(path):
        dir = os.path.join(path, item)
        if is_package( dir ):
            if base:
                module_name = "%(base)s.%(item)s" % vars()
            else:
                module_name = item
            packages[module_name] = dir
            packages.update(find_packages(dir, module_name))
    return packages
}}}

Then call {{{find_packages}}} to get the set of packages to be included (note that this call assumes that the packages are sub-directories of the directory where setup.py resides).

{{{
packages = find_packages(".")
}}}

Then use {{{packages}}} as the source within your call to setup:

{{{
setup (
    name = "pytable",
    package_dir = packages,
#...
    packages = packages.keys(),
    **extra_arguments
    )
}}}

You can see a real-world usage example in the [[http://pytable.cvs.sourceforge.net/pytable/table/setup.py?view=markup|PyTable setup script]]

= Discussion =

There should be some way to do this with distutils own machinery, I just don't know what it would be.

Idea: Giving “packages=['egg', 'ham']” should be enough for Distutils2 to include the egg and ham packages and their subpackages, using a function similar to Setuptools/Distribute find_package (or the one written here). merwok

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CategoryDistutilsCookbook