I recently installed Fedora 7 and looked at /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages. The directory has numerous Python packages installed but no egg-info and few .pth files. Of the three .pth files in my installation, only one has a content different from the name of the package (pointing to a subdirectory of site-packages with a different name). Setuptools has the advantage of simplifying preparation of rpms because it has find_packages(). However, it produces egg-info and .pth files as part of the rpm's. I can understand the need for these files when packaging into eggs for installation in places other than python/site-packages or when packaging for non-Linux operating systems. But why are they needed when installing as rpms on Linux systems into site-packages? I think this issue applies to most Linux packaging, which is usually either rpm or deb. Stan Klein