At 03:42 PM 2/9/2007 -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
This makes this approach uninteresting for buildout, which doesn't write to site-packages or have any site-packages equivalent.
It sound like it also violates the egg promise that you just have to put the egg in sys.path for it to be useable. buildout relies on this promise.
Well, the backward-compatibility mode is for making system packages like .rpm files, and the namespace package support for that is a hack to deal with the fact that such packaging tools don't like to have multiple .rpm's or whatever containing the same file (i.e. the namespace package's __init__.py). This would be an even more extreme hack, if we tried to support 'develop' mode for procrustean package_dirs setups. You do, however, make a good point regarding the egg promise. As far as I can see, then, there is no way to support crazy package_dirs in combination with namespace packages, without automatically creating a bunch of directories and __init__.py files, along with some other crazy hacks. So the idea is probably a dead duck.