At 10:11 AM 3/25/2009 -0500, Olemis Lang wrote:

... but Trac plugins *do require* egg files ... (AFAIK after reading Trac docs and implementation of plugin upload from /admin/plugins, egg cache for plugins ... and so on ...) and this is what I was talking about ... apps (e.g. Trac) depending *today* on setuptools (e.g. egg files ...)

Trac uses entry points to access plugins. Those plugins do not require .egg files, unless Trac specifically wrote code of their own that requires .egg files. If you install a plugin from source using pip or a system package manager, no .egg file is involved -- you'll have an .egg-info directory instead, alongside the installed code. The pkg_resources API for accessing entry points works with either .egg files or .egg-info directories.