At 12:59 PM 5/19/2009 +1200, Noah Gift wrote:

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 12:59 PM, P.J. Eby <<mailto:pje@telecommunity.com>pje@telecommunity.com> wrote: At 08:34 PM 5/18/2009 -0400, David Lyon wrote: Why not keep the .EGG_INFO files in the site-packages directory?

That's where they go. Each installed project has its own .egg-info subdirectory containing the listed files. See the EggFormats documentation for details. PEP 376 is just adding stdlib support for the .egg-info format defined by setuptools, and adding a new RECORD file to it.

But if this implementation is the same as eggs, then each egg directory is then scanned and imported into sys.path, unlike normal packages which are called via simple namespaces.

You are confused. Please refer to the EggFormats documentation for the layout difference between .egg and .egg-info: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats .egg-info eggs look just like "normal" distutils installs, except for the addition of a "project-version-pyversion.egg-info" subdirectory alongside the code. In Python 2.5 and up, distutils also installs packages this way, except the "project-version-pyversion.egg-info" is a file instead of a directory - as documented in the above documentation. PEP 376 is simply proposing stdlib support for querying the existing formats, and adding a new standard RECORD file to go in that directory.