Can my setup.py support the installation of the following files, or should they be included in debian/fedora packages instead? 1. few examples files? 2. static html documentation files? 3. man pages for the console scripts?
The distutils doesn't really support installing such things well; you can certainly include them in your *source* distribution, though.
Also, I upload a source distribution (sdist) to the Python Package Index 4. should I use an *egg* instead?
No, it's not necessary. Eggs are mainly useful as a drop-in-and-use format for application plugins (such as extensions to Chandler, Trac, and other plugin-enabled application environments), and distributing precompiled C extensions on certain platforms. easy_install and pip can both operate just fine on source distributions, and if your code is only pure Python, you don't need to distribute binaries.
Thank you, I got it.