In the past I've managed a shared library of Python packages by using distutils to install them in secondary Library and Scripts directories on a shared network drive. This worked fine, even in our multi-platform environment. With advent of eggs, however, the secondary Library directory must be a formal "Site Directory" and not just on 
sys.path. The extra delay caused by the layer of network has caused simply getting --help for a simple script to take almost three seconds when it previously only took a tenth of a second. Some scripts that use many packages installed as eggs on the network drive can take as many as 8 seconds just to display the help message.
<br><br>I would like to install architecture independent Python packages in a single shared location so that everyone using that location is automatically upgraded. The in-house packages are modified about five times a day on average. I would like to take advantage of setuptools versioning (thus using the pkg_resources mechanisms) so deprecated portions of the system can be kept intact in some frozen state of development without having to include the version number in the package name explicitly (
i.e. mymod, mymod2, .., mymod42).<br><br>What is the recommended way of using eggs in such an environment?<br><br>Your thoughts and advice are appreciated,<br>Alex<br><br>