On 19.02.2013 23:01, Daniel Holth wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:34 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
>
>> On 19.02.2013 14:40, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 11:23 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
>>>> * PEP 426 doesn't include any mention of the egg distribution format,
>>>>   even though it's the most popular distribution format at the moment.
>>>>   It should at least include the location of the metadata file
>>>>   in eggs (EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO) and egg installations
>>>>   (<eggdir>/EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO).
>>>
>>> "Other tools involved in Python distribution may also use this format."
>>>
>>> The egg format has never been, and never will be, officially endorsed
>>> by python-dev. The wheel format is the standard format for binary
>>> distribution, and PEP 376 defines the standard location for metadata
>>> on installed distributions.
>>
>> Oh, come on, Nick, that's just silly. setuptools was included in stdlib
>> for a short while, so the above is simply wrong. Eggs are the most
>> widely used binary distribution format for Python package on PyPI:
>>
>> # wc *files.csv
>>   25585   25598 1431013 2013-02-19-egg-files.csv
>>    4619    4640  236694 2013-02-19-exe-files.csv
>>     254     255   13402 2013-02-19-msi-files.csv
>>  104691  104853 5251962 2013-02-19-tar-gz-files.csv
>>      24      24    1221 2013-02-19-whl-files.csv
>>   17937   18022  905913 2013-02-19-zip-files.csv
>>  153110  153392 7840205 total
>>
>> (based on todays PyPI stats)
>>
>> It doesn't really help ignoring realities... and I'm saying
>> that as one of the core devs who got setuptools kicked out of
>> the stdlib again.
>>
>> --
>> Marc-Andre Lemburg
>> eGenix.com
>>
>
> The wheel philosophy is that it should be supported by both python-dev and
> setuptools and that you should feel happy about using setuptools if you
> like it whether or not python-dev (currently) endorses that. If you are
> using setuptools (distribute's pkg_resources) then you can use both at the
> same time.
>
> Distribute, distutils and setuptools' problems have not been well
> understood which I think is why there has been a need to discredit
> setuptools by calling it non-standard. It is the defacto standard. If your
> packages have dependencies there is no other choice. Wheel tries to solve
> the real problem by allowing you to build a package with setuptools while
> giving the end-user the choice of installing setuptools or not.
>
> Of course eggs are the most popular right now. The wheel format is very
> egg-like while avoiding some of egg's problems. See the comparison in the
> PEP or read the story on wheel's rtfd. The wheel project includes tools to
> losslessly convert eggs or bdist_wininst to wheel.

That's all fine, but it doesn't explain the refusal to add the
documentation of the location of the PKG-INFO file in eggs ?