I've just added experimental preliminary support for the .egg-info file convention in Subversion. It makes the assumption that an .egg-info file will contain the standard distutils "PKG-INFO" data, that the distutils generate for source distributions and that existing egg formats include as an EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO or .egg-info/PKG-INFO file. (It still recognizes .egg-info directories, of course.) I haven't yet added support for installing an egg in this format; I've been under other deadline pressure and this is the first I've gotten to work on this in a couple of weeks. I wanted to go ahead and get this basic capability out there so that people porting e.g. TurboGears could go ahead and make some progress by manually creating .egg-info files. Please let me know (via the distutils-sig list) if you have any issues. Issues with the *implementation*, that is, not the idea of having .egg-info files. I'm already aware that it's somewhat controversial to some. ;) The setuptools patch is at: http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&rev=41615 And you can fetch the latest source into a 'setuptools' directory, ready for patching, by using: easy_install -eb. setuptools==dev (The -e means "fetch an editable source version and unpack it", the -b. means to do so in the current directory.) Or you can just use a direct Subversion checkout. (I don't build binary eggs for interim releases.) Note that if you build a setuptools egg from this version, its version number (as expressed in its filename or .egg-info filename) should be '0.6a9.dev-r41615'. This will be handled automatically if you build the egg with setuptools, but if you're creating an .egg-info directory in order to flatten it, you'll want to make sure you keep the same version information as the original. I'll post again when the --single-version-externally-managed option to 'install' and 'easy_install' is also available.