At 10:59 AM 8/17/2007 +0100, Luis Bruno wrote:

The really *big* -1 this has is that I'm basically gonna be using --single-version-externally-managed eggs (which makes it impossible to have multiple "inactive" versions and require() them, if I understood Phillip Eby correctly).

You can have inactive versions and require() them, they just have to be .egg files or directories. You can have a "default" version that's installed --single-version, e.g. by a system package manager such as RPM.

I was thinking "sync local" re-gets the repository's Packages master-list. Then you read in the locally installed ones (which is a matter of traversing sys.path and looking for the .egg-info files; I think those are now (as of 2.5) expected to be there.

Please, please, *please* use the published APIs in pkg_resources for this. Too many people are writing tools that inspect egg files and directories directly -- and get it only partly right, making assumptions about the formats that aren't valid across platforms, Python versions, etc., etc. In general, if you are doing absolutely *anything* with on-disk formats of eggs, and you didn't read enough of the docs to find the equivalent APIs, it's a near-certainty that you don't understand the format well enough to write your own versions. Meanwhile, pkg_resources is proposed for inclusion in the Python 2.6 stdlib, so it's not like it's going to be hard to get a hold of. In this particular example, by the way, if you want to find all locally installed packages, you probably want to be using an Environment instance, which indexes all installed packages by package name, and gives you objects you can inspect in a variety of ways, including using .get_metadata('PKG-INFO') calls to read the .egg-info files -- or .egg-info/PKG-INFO, or EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO, or whatever file is actually involved. (This is why you need to use the API -- there are a lot of devils in the details.)

I think easy_install -f <url> can work against an Apache directory index.

Yes.

I thought that was the whole point behind it, really.

One of them, anyway. There are other aspects besides -f that work for directory indexes, such as PyPI "home page" and "download" URL links.