Phillip J. Eby writes:
7. Many wanted to ability to install files anywhere in the install tree and not just under the Python package. Under distutils this was possible but it was removed in setuptools for security reasons.
It wasn't security, it was manageability. Egg-based installation means containment, (analagous to GNU stow) and therefore portability and disposability of plugins. (Which again is what eggs were really developed for in the first place.)
defining containment this way doesn't help when preparing eggs for inclusion in a linux distribution. E.g. users on these distributions are used to find log files in /var/log (maybe in a subdir), documentation in /usr/share/doc/<package name>. You probably will get different views about manageability depending on your background (used to linux distribution standards or used to standards set by setuptools/cheeseshop). Packagers currently move these files manually to the standard locations and often have to keep symlinks in the egg dirs to these locations. Installation on linux distributions is handled by existing package tools which is unlikely to change. So it would be nice to find a common layer which can be used for both distribution methods, optionally enabling this with some kind of option like --install-files-in-places-not-handled-by-setuptools ;) Matthias