On Apr 9, 2008, at 12:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
You are talking here about bdist_rpm and not about a tool that would take a Python package distributed as an egg file and convert the egg to an rpm or a deb. Unfortunately, some Python packagers are beginning to limit their focus only to egg distribution. That creates a problem for users who have native operating system package management.
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.
In general, it would be good if eggs came with .py files by default instead of .pyc files. I've opened a ticket on my setuptools trac about this proposal: http://allmydata.org/trac/setuptools/ticket/5 # binary eggs should come with .py files by default, rather than .pyc files Regards, Zooko