Fix settings lineage

[kirienko]

This fixes adding a lot of extra newlines during simple changes in settings.py during the installation process (spotted by @maweki).

The problem was that by default print function obviously adds an extra \n in the end.

I also changed the inplace parameter from 1 to True for sake of readability.

[kirienko]

Hold on a second, why it breaks our build now?

[maweki]

Is this really best practice for coding paths during setup? I'd guess not. If we want to throw this part of the setup out and replace it by something somewhat maintainable, I am all in favor of it.

[kirienko]

@maweki I fully agree that this way of doing things might not be obvious. But python packaging is rather strange thing by itself, and we need to have at least something for right now. This doesn't fix #107 of course but this will do the installation a tiny bit less ugly.

Maybe we can kindly ask @takluyver to tell us about best practices 😏

[takluyver]

I think this looks OK as a small fix for a small issue.

I'm not aware of any best practice for this kind of thing. Python packaging is mostly designed around delivering libraries rather than applications, and the general pattern is that anything your code wants to access at runtime is delivered inside the package folder, and accessed using a relative path, e.g. with importlib.resources.

Python packaging has moved away from running setup.py install: pip will now try to use a wheel, and if one isn't available, it will run setup.py bdist_wheel to make a wheel, and then install from that. This is important because the build step doesn't know where the package will be installed. And installing a wheel doesn't run any code from that wheel. In short, this approach of rewriting paths at install time is doomed.

[maweki]

In short, this approach of rewriting paths at install time is doomed.

Doomed and unmaintainable. Is there a way we can do it with relative paths? What would we need to do to fix this?

[kirienko]

BTW I tried to install gourmet from the package created by python setup.py bdist, and it didn't help either.

[kirienko]

Thank you Thomas!
If there's no other objections, I would merge this small fix and, I'd offer everyone to continue the discussion in #107