So we're writing a full-text search framework MongoDb. MongoDB is pretty much javascript-native, so we wrote the javascript library first, and it works.

Now I'm trying to write a python framework for it, which will be partially in python, but partially use those same stored javascript functions - the javascript functions are an intrinsic part of the library. On the other hand, the javascript framework does not depend on python. since they are pretty intertwined it seems like it's worthwhile keeping them in the same repository.

I'm trying to work out a way of structuring the whole project to give the javascript and python frameworks equal status (maybe a ruby driver or whatever in the future?), but still allow the python library to install nicely.

Currently it looks like this: (simplified a little)

javascript/jstest/test1.js
javascript/mongo-fulltext/search.js
javascript/mongo-fulltext/util.js
python/docs/indext.rst
python/tests/search_test.py
python/tests/__init__.py
python/mongofulltextsearch/__init__.py
python/mongofulltextsearch/mongo_search.py
python/mongofulltextsearch/util.py
python/setup.py

I've skipped out a few files for simplicity, but you get the general idea; it' a pretty much standard python project... except that it depends critcally ona whole bunch of javascript which is stored in a sibling directory tree.

What's the preferred setup for dealing with this kind of thing when it comes to setuptools? I can work out how to use package_data etc to install data files that live inside my python project as per the setuptools docs.

The problem is if i want to use setuptools to install stuff, including the javascript files from outside the python code tree, and then also access them in a consistent way when I'm developing the python code and when it is easy_installed to someone's site.

Is that supported behaviour for setuptools? Should i be using paver or distutils2 or Distribute or something? (basic distutils is not an option; the whole reason I'm doing this is to enable requirements tracking) How should i be reading the contents of those files into python scripts?