Internal documentation for egg formats now available
To satisfy requests on Python-Dev, I've just added some internal "developer's" documentation to setuptools. You don't need to read it unless you are working on setuptools itself, want to assist in troubleshooting a problem with your installation, or want to understand how setuptools may affect your packaging of libraries that use it (i.e., you're building RPMs or debs or what-have-you for packages that use setuptools, or any Python 2.5 package). The docs can be found at http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/trunk/setuptools/doc/formats.txt (source text), or http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats (HTML-formatted version). Included are summary descriptions of the formats of all of the standard metadata produced by setuptools, along with pointers to the existing manuals that describe the syntax used for representing requirements, entry points, etc. as text. The .egg, .egg-info, and .egg-link formats and layouts are also specified, along with the filename syntax used to embed project/version/Python version/platform metadata. Last, but not least, there are detailed explanations of how resources (such as C extensions) are extracted on-the-fly and cached, how C extensions get imported from zipfiles, and how EasyInstall works around the limitations of Python's default sys.path initialization. Please remember, however, that a lot of this stuff is purely internal details and subject to change. Most of the information is also available to you directly via the "pkg_resources" API, so you probably don't care about the actual file formats in such cases anyway.
participants (1)
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Phillip J. Eby