So I created a setup.py script for my python program with distutils and I think it behaves a bit strange. First off it installs all data_files into /usr/local/my_directory by default which is a bit weird since this isn't a really common place to store data, is it?
I changed the path to /usr/share/my_directory/. But now I'm not able to write to the database inside that directory and I can't set required permission from within setup.py neither since the actual database file has not been created when I run it.
Is my approach wrong? Should I use another tool for distributing?
Because at least for Linux, writing a simple setup sh script seems easier to me at the moment.
The immediate solution is to invoke setup.py with --prefix=/the/path/you/want. 
A better approach would be to include the data as package_data. This way they will be installed along side your python package and you'll find it much easier to manage it (find paths etc).
distutils setup script under linux - permission issue