[Python-Dev] Internal documentation for egg formats now available (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Thu Apr 27 18:47:44 CEST 2006

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

Please see http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools/doc/formats.txt for source, or http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats for an HTML-formatted version.

Included are summary descriptions of the formats of all of the standard metadata produced by setuptools, along with pointers to the existing manuals that describe the syntax used for representing requirements, entry points, etc. as text. The .egg, .egg-info, and .egg-link formats and layouts are also specified, along with the filename syntax used to embed project/version/Python version/platform metadata. Last, but not least, there are detailed explanations of how resources (such as C extensions) are extracted on-the-fly and cached, how C extensions get imported from zipfiles, and how EasyInstall works around the limitations of Python's default sys.path initialization. If there's anything else you'd like in there, please let me know.

Thanks.

Just read that you are hijacking site.py for setuptools' "just works" purposes.

Please be aware that by allowing .pth files in all PYTHONPATH directories you are opening up a security hole - anyone with write-permission to one of these .pth files could manipulate other user's use of Python.

That's the reason why only site-packages .pth files are taken into account, since normally only root has write access to this directory.

The added startup time for scanning PYTHONPATH for .pth files and processing them is also not mentioned in the documentation. Every Python invocation would have to pay for this - regardless of whether eggs are used or not.

I really wish that we could agree on an installation format for package (meta) data that does not rely on ZIP files. All the unnecessary magic that you have in your design would just go away - together with most of the issues people on this list have with it.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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