At 09:10 AM 4/10/2008 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

For me, on Windows, the biggest negative aspect of eggs is when people provide binary installations (ones with compiled C extensions) in eggs only. I prefer bdist_wininst/bdist_msi installers, and with compiled code, I can't always build from source (complex library dependencies, etc).

So, given that an egg already has everything that is needed at runtime, how easy would it be to create a tool which converted an egg into a bdist_wininst installer? With that, I could happily forget about eggs.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-March/077959.html Basically what you need to do is rewrite the zipfile index such that everything is prefixed with PURELIB/ or PLATLIB/, except for the EGG-INFO directory which must be renamed to match the original egg's filename, plus '-info' -- i.e., foo-1.2-py2.3-win32.egg should have its EGG-INFO renamed to PURELIB/foo-1.2-py2.3-win32.egg-info or PLATLIB/foo-1.2-py2.3-win32.egg-info. Once the egg is reformatted in this way, it's a perfectly valid zipfile that the existing bdist_wininst code could be reused to turn into an .exe.