[Python-Dev] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Apr 8 19:42:08 CEST 2008

At 10:01 AM 4/8/2008 -0700, zooko wrote:

On Mar 26, 2008, at 7:34 PM, Chris McDonough wrote: > zooko wrote:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-March/078243.html >> Here is a simple proposal: make the standard Python "import" >> mechanism notice eggs on the PYTHONPATH and insert them (into the >> same location) on the sys.path. >> This eliminates the #1 problem with eggs -- that they don't >> easily work when installing them into places other than your site- >> packages and that if you allow any of them to be installed on >> your system then they take precedence over your non-egg packages >> even you explicitly put those other packages earlier in your >> PYTHONPATH. (That latter behavior is very disagreeable to more >> than a few prorgammers.) > > Sorry if I'm out of the loop and there's some subtlety here that > I'm disregarding, but it doesn't appear that either of the issues > you mention is a actually problem with eggs. These are instead > problems with how eggs get installed by easyinstall (which uses > a .pth file to extend sys.path). It's reasonable to put eggs on > the PYTHONPATH manually (e.g. sys.path.append('/path/to/some.egg')) > instead of using easyinstall to install them. Yes, you are missing something. While many programmers, such as yourself and Lennart Regebro (who posted to this thread) find the current eggs system to be perfectly convenient and to Just Work, many others, such as Glyph Lefkowitz (who posted to a related thread) find them to be so annoying that they actively ensure that no eggs are ever allowed to touch their system. The reasons for this latter problem are two: 1. You can't conveniently install eggs into a non-system directory, such as ~/my-python-stuff.

Wha?

2. If you allow even a single egg to be installed into your PYTHONPATH, it will change the semantics of your PYTHONPATH.

Only in the same way that manually putting an egg on the front of PYTHONPATH can be considered to "change the semantics" of your PYTHONPATH.

Both of these problems are directly caused by the need for eggs to hack your site.py. If Python automatically added eggs found in the PYTHONPATH to the sys.path, both of these problems would go away.

And add new ones.

I am skeptical that the current proposals to define a new database for installed packages will fare any better than the current eggs scheme does in this respect.

The purpose for the installation database is to allow easy_install to eschew the use of .egg files or directories for anything other than multi-version installs. Thus, no need to add those .egg files or directories to the head of the PYTHONPATH. Conflicts would be handled at install time rather than runtime, in other words.

I am skeptical that prorgammers are going to be willing to use a new database format. They already have a database -- their filesystem -- and they already have the tools to control it -- mv, rm, and PYTHONPATH. Many of them already hate the existence the "easyinstlal.pth" database file, and I don't see why a new database file would be any different.

PEP 262 does not propose a database file -- it proposes the inclusion of a metadata file for each installed distribution.

My proposal makes the current benefits of eggs -- clean, easy code re- use among programmers -- more compatible with their current tools -- mv, rm, and PYTHONPATH. It is also forward-compatible with more sophisticated proposals to add features like uninstall and operating system integration.

Actually, your current proposal doesn't work, unless you at least have some way to indicate which version of an egg should be automatically added to sys.path -- and some way to change that. Otherwise, you might as well use the -m option to easy_install, and require() the eggs at runtime. (Which needs neither .pth files nor site.py hacking.)

Meanwhile, my understanding is that the people who dislike eggs, dislike them because when they install a setuptools-based package, it's installed as an egg by default. The installation database proposal (and by the way, people really should read and understand PEP 262, including the open issues, before trying to compete with it), will allow setuptools-based packages to install the "old-fashioned" way by default. That is, not as eggs. Similarly, easy_install would be able to skip installing .eggs unless you wanted multi-version support.

So, people who don't like eggs would never see them, since the only way you'd ever get them would be via easy_install -m, and they would never use it.

By the way, since I posted my proposal two weeks ago I have pointed a couple of Python hackers who currently refuse to use eggs at the URL:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-March/078243.html They both agreed that it made perfect sense. I told one of them about the alternate proposal to define a new database file to contain a list of installed packages, and he sighed and rolled his eyes and said "So they are planning to reinvent apt!".

No, we're planning to make it possible for easy_install not to overwrite things that would break your system, and allow distutils and setuptools to uninstall what they installed. That's a considerably less ambitious goal, by far. :)

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