how to install real python modules in dist-packages?

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I've followed this documentation on how to use setup.py and CMakeLists.txt to use python modules in a catkin package. It pretty much "works" but I've observed that it actually puts a fake __init__.py into python2.7/dist-packages/my_package, which will modify my python path at runtime to include my module's src dir. This works OK for actually running the code, but static code analysis (eg. pylint) doesn't execute the code that changes the path and therefore can't find my modules.

I've noticed that other ROS python packages have the real python files in dist-packages so my question is how do I do that? I suspect that it has something to do with the catkin build type being Release, but I'm pretty sure my build script is already using RelWithDebInfo.