On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby
That is indeed a problem -- but it's a social one, not a technical one. It's trivial for the publisher of an egg to change their command line from "setup.py bdist_egg upload" to "setup.py sdist bdist_egg upload", as soon as their users (politely) request that they do so.
I know you say it in http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#distributing-a-setuptools..., but perhaps you should be more explicit about the best practice being to distribute an sdist as well as one or more eggs and highlight this with some standout text like: """ When uploading your project to PyPI, always upload your sdist in addition to any eggs unless you have a good idiosyncratic reason not to. The easy_install tool can also download and install sdist's on all platforms (universally for pure-python packages and provided compilers are available for distributions containing python extensions), so uploading them gives your project the widest possible audience. """ Perhaps this will help some the social challenges. Regards, Alex