At 04:00 PM 12/23/2008 +0000, Paul Moore wrote:

PPS Seriously, setuptools and the adoptions of eggs has pushed a lot of code to be much more careful about unwarranted assumptions that code lives in the filesystem. That's an incredibly good thing, and very hard to do right (witness the setuptools "zip_safe" parameter which acts as a get-out clause). Much kudos to setuptools for getting as far as it has.

And ironically, if I ever get the time to actually work on a new version of easy_install (as opposed to perpetually tweaking the old one), the default zipping and default sys.path munging will be among the first things to go. ;-) Ironically, my choice of isolated directories and zipfiles for quick-and-dirty uninstall support has ended up costing far too much, compared to if I'd just taken the time to design a decent uninstall feature. Of course, hindsight is 20-20; in order to fully understand the requirements of a problem, you sometimes have to get a rather long way towards solving it the simple, obvious... and wrong way. (And, it didn't help that I had significant time constraints pushing me in the direction of the Seemingly-Simplest-At-The-Moment Thing That Could Possibly Work.)