[Distutils] Preliminary support for .egg-info files in Subversion

[Phillip J. Eby]

I've just added experimental preliminary support for the .egg-info file 
convention in Subversion.  It makes the assumption that an .egg-info file 
will contain the standard distutils "PKG-INFO" data, that the distutils 
generate for source distributions and that existing egg formats include as 
an EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO or .egg-info/PKG-INFO file.  (It still recognizes 
.egg-info directories, of course.)

I haven't yet added support for installing an egg in this format; I've been 
under other deadline pressure and this is the first I've gotten to work on 
this in a couple of weeks.  I wanted to go ahead and get this basic 
capability out there so that people porting e.g. TurboGears could go ahead 
and make some progress by manually creating .egg-info files.  Please let me 
know (via the distutils-sig list) if you have any issues.  Issues with the 
*implementation*, that is, not the idea of having .egg-info files.  I'm 
already aware that it's somewhat controversial to some.  ;)

The setuptools patch is at:

    http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&rev=41615


And you can fetch the latest source into a 'setuptools' directory, ready 
for patching, by using:

    easy_install -eb. setuptools==dev

(The -e means "fetch an editable source version and unpack it", the -b. 
means to do so in the current directory.)

Or you can just use a direct Subversion checkout.  (I don't build binary 
eggs for interim releases.)

Note that if you build a setuptools egg from this version, its version 
number (as expressed in its filename or .egg-info filename) should be 
'0.6a9.dev-r41615'.  This will be handled automatically if you build the 
egg with setuptools, but if you're creating an .egg-info directory in order 
to flatten it, you'll want to make sure you keep the same version 
information as the original.

I'll post again when the --single-version-externally-managed option to 
'install' and 'easy_install' is also available.