EDIT: I rewrote and shortened the question because it seemed unclear!
I am currently writing a python program, and some of the functionalities are improved if it has access to some specific, non-python files. (I am talking about datasets here)
The problem is that I don't have the right to share those files myself, and also that they are very big, which is not practical for sharing them along with my library.
The user has two possibilities:
- Using the program stand-alone, with only basic features
- Download the files by requesting them to the owner(s), then use advance features
In that second case, I would like to know what is the best practice for asking the user "If you have these files on your machine, tell me where so I can use advanced functionalities from now on". I can see several ways to achieve this but none of them seemed very clean or pythonic (e.g. Ask the user to copy files at a specific place within the library, or ask the user to write the paths in a config file, etc...).
What is the good way of doing this? Or at least, is there a standard way?