[Distutils] bdist_egg and source files

[Kevin Dangoor]

On 8/9/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 11:40 AM 8/9/2005 -0400, Kevin Dangoor wrote:
> >Something that just struck me as I kept running bdist_egg
> >--exclude-source-files is that it seems like "bdist" would imply
> >exclusion of source files.
> 
> Source is important for tracebacks and debugging, especially if an egg is
> installed unpacked.  The --exclude-source-files option is intended to allow
> space conservation when creating applications for distribution, or for "IP
> protection" uses.  These are both fairly specialized build situations, not
> the common case for distributing an open source library.

And it now occurs to me that "sdist_egg" doesn't make sense either,
because the egg has compiled C modules and such. Your explanation
about the debugging value of the source also explains the
--always-unzip easy_install option, which I thought much about.

(I happen to fall into the "space conservation for distributing
applications" category, which I agree is somewhat specialized.)

Thanks for the explanation.

Kevin