Paul Moore wrote:
FYI, if there's a source distribution, the new --editable option (in CVS) allows you to download and extract the source for editing, without building it or anything.
I'm not sure how that helps. If there's a source, I can just run setup.py bdist_wininst anyway, so I don't see the difference.
The only real reason to use --editable is to get access to easy_install's ability to find, download, and unpack packages. If you aren't interested in that, then it isn't really important. I imagine at some time in the future easy_install will also read and confirm signatures, and may have things like GUI frontends. But I think that's a ways off, and some things require a larger discussion (like signatures).
I could probably actually add postinstall hooks to EasyInstall, except that it sort of goes against the concept of eggs being a "zero install" format. It's worth thinking about/investigating though.
Given that the trend seems to be to install eggs via easy_install, I'm not sure "zero install" still applies. But if I can still just drop eggs into sys.path, maybe it does. Must review this stuff again.
If you drop an egg in sys.path, you have to use pkg_resources.require('PackageName') to actually load it. easy_install also manipulates a .pth file, so require() isn't needed (but won't hurt). For egg-aware applications this isn't an issue -- which almost the same as saying that for apps using eggs as plugins it isn't an issue.
That's not going to happen real soon; only a relatively tiny number of people even know eggs exist, and as long as they have a reasonably-usable bdist_wininst available then it's certainly a valid choice to just distribute that, thereby pleasing EasyInstall users and non-users alike.
That's what I thought. And it makes me reluctant to bother with eggs for standard packages at all, sadly. (Plugins etc are a completely different matter - for them, I think it's a wonderful technology!)
Sure; as a developer setuptools has useful features besides eggs, and is a superset of distutils. I don't think there's any real reason *not* to use setuptools; but it's also fine to ignore setuptools' extra features. -- Ian Bicking / ianb@colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org