[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5. (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Apr 21 01:05:41 CEST 2006

At 11:49 PM 4/20/2006 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

It's possible that (1) can be solved by making all distutils installs create egg metadata.

This is already planned to be addressed in Python 2.5, via the install_egg_info added to the distutils. The implementation is already in the trunk, but not documented. (Guido approved the patch, for anybody concerned about "who said" it should go in.) It installs a standard distutils PKG-INFO file as Project-Version.egg-info alongside the installed package(s).

A key benefit of distutils for me was that a standard Windows binary installer format became common. I'd hate to lose that. (And I don't feel that eggs are a comparable option - unless a complete package management solution gets added).

Side note: The "nest" command framework is supposed to be that solution for platforms without system package managers, i.e. full list/delete/etc. support.

Of course, that's a command-line tool, but it should be a lot easier to build a GUI on top of nest than on top of easy_install.

Maybe a .egg -> .bdistwininst converter is feasible. I don't know. If so, that may be a way out.

easy_install contains the reverse: a bdist_wininst -> .egg converter. Going the other way should actually be easier, if somebody wants to take a whack at it. Might make a good test case for the not-yet-written "formats overview" document on eggs, actually.

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