[Bf-python] Packaging issues

[alex mole]

Hi

I'm not sure if this has been touched on before, but is there an 
accepted way to package Bpython scripts so that they'll install and run 
easily?

I have written a large Blender plugin which will convert a scene with 
some blocks into a city (generating doors, windows, roofs and texturing 
them all). This means that you can create half-decent cities in very 
little time :) I'd really like to put this up on the web, but I'm not 
sure how to package it [it currently needs a huge readme with lots of 
fiddly instructions to install it...].

There is a large amount of code involved, and a large amount of data as 
well. It would be possible to copy the whole lot into .blender/scripts, 
but that would be pretty horrible...

I can see several approaches, each with its own set of issues:

* install the code into the Python site directory and write a thin 
wrapper around it to plug in to blender. This seems like the best 
approach, and the most in-keeping with python in general. The standard 
distutils could be used to do this automatically. However, there will be 
a large amount of data involved which will need to be put somewhere that 
can be found from the blender plugin. The location of this will change 
on different platforms, which may prove difficult in terms of writing 
the plugin script.

* install everything in a single directory and adjust PYTHONPATH [or 
whatever it's called ;)] so that python can find it. This seems like a 
worse idea than the previous one, but it wouldn't require 
root/administrator priveleges.

* or something else :)


What are your thoughts?

Alex