In general, pkg_resources is better for this purpose because provides support for accessing data files residing in the module even when the module is actually loaded from a zipfile. This request drops that ability.

I imagine that pkg_resources is not available on Google App Engine since it's not standard? But in order to not regress the behavior, could you please modify this pull request to try to import and use the pkg_resources method, and if it fails, fall back to using the filesystem?