At 10:46 AM 1/15/2006 -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
The eggs quick guide http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs#using-eggs says that eggs can be installed by just putting them on sys.path. This doesn't seem to be enough though. A .pth file seem to also be necessary.
Am I missing something?
Two somethings. :) First, you *can* install an egg by putting it on sys.path. A .pth file is just one *way* of putting it on sys.path. What you're asking about is installing an egg by putting it *in a directory that's on sys.path*, which is a different thing. You can also do this, as long as you're using the pkg_resources API to request the egg, or it's one of your requirements specified by your egg. The only egg that absolutely *must* be in a .pth (or otherwise get onto sys.path) is the setuptools egg. As long as that's the case, then it is not necessary to have .pth files, because the act of require()-ing an egg will cause it and all its dependencies to be added.
Or is the documentation incorrect?
It might be a bit confusing about this issue, but I've so far found that changing it around doesn't help much. :( This is simply something so new to most people that they seem to project their existing thought process onto it no matter what it actually says, and then only get it after bumping into a problem or mental contradiction. If you think you can improve upon the comprehensibility without making it so complex that nobody will read it anyway, feel free to submit a patch. :)