Streamline including hooks in a package

[bwoodsend]

Currently, including a binary or data file in a setuptools package requires a disproportionate amount of work to get PyInstaller to pick it up.

1. In theory all you need is collect_data_files("package") or something similar.
2. But of course that needs to go in a hook hook-package.py.
3. But you can't just dump that hook in your package - you need to declare it with entry points.
4. You have to put the hook in a folder and, instead letting you declare the folder in the entry point, you declare a function (rather than just a variable) which returns this folder.

All this is just to tell PyInstaller that no I didn't include that shared library in my package for fun.

In doing this, unless you pedantically structure your package to prevent it, the package has now been loaded twice in the master process: Once to evaluate the entry point to get the package-defined get_hooks_dir() then again to evaluate it. So our exec_statement() isolation is not only circumvented but is wasted processing time.

I'd like to add either some shortcuts or some sane defaults. We can keep the original totally flexible model but only use it if it's really needed. The ability to define multiple hooks is not generally useful and the ability to define hooks for other packages is even less so.

• Why not let the entry point define a variable rather than a function which gets what is almost certainly a predetermined variable.
• Or define the hook dir directly as the directory of an importable package: entry_points={"pyinstaller40": ["hooks-in=package"]}?
• Or let the entry point define hook code directly: entry_points={"pyinstaller40": ["hook-package=collect_data_files('package')"]}?
• Better still, why not just search for hooks in the same location as the source file they hook and forget about entry points? Even with huge amounts of source files, this is not an expensive for loop.