Probably all these discussions are better on distutils-sig (just copying python-dev to note the movement of the discussion) On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman@voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

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Outside of binaries on Windows, I'm still unsure if installing eggs serves a useful purpose.  I'm not sure if eggs are any better than wininst binaries either...?

Many Windows users would be quite happy if the standard mechanism for installing non-source distributions on Windows was via the wininst binaries.

I wonder if it is going to be possible to make this compatible with the upcoming distutils package management 'stuff' (querying for installed packages, uninstallation etc) since installation/uninstallation goes through the Windows system package management feature.  I guess it would be eminently possible but require some reasonably high level Windows-fu to do.

As far as pip works, it unpacks a package and runs "python setup.py install (and some options that aren't that interesting, but are provided specifically by setuptools)". Well, it's slightly more complicated, but more to the point it doesn't install in-process or dictate how setup.py works, except that it takes some specific options. Running a Windows installer in the same way would be fine, in that sense. Alternately pip could unpack the wininst zip file and install it directly; I'm not sure if that would be better or worse? If wininst uses the central package manager of the OS then certain features (like virtualenv, PYTHONHOME, --prefix, etc) would not be possible. For Distribute (or Setuptools or by association pip) to see that a package is installed, it must have the appropriate metadata. For Setuptools (and Distribute 0.6) this is a directory or file, on sys.path, "Package.egg-info" (or in Package-X.Y.egg/EGG-INFO). If a file, it should be a PKG-INFO file, if a directory it should contain a PKG-INFO file. So however the package gets installed, if that metadata is installed then it can be queried. I don't think querying the Windows system package management would be necessary or desirable. Nobody is trying that with deb/rpm either. -- Ian Bicking | http://blog.ianbicking.org | http://topplabs.org/civichacker