[Distutils] Egg support for system packages (including bdist_wininst)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:39 PM 12/22/2005 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > At 01:52 PM 12/22/2005 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> >> Somewhat related to this: wouldn't it be possible to build
> >> .egg ZIP files using the same layout, ie. with the .egg-info
> >> subdir inside the package instead of having a top-level
> >> EGG-INFO directory in the ZIP file ?!
> >>
> >> That way, you could simply unzip the .egg file somewhere
> >> on your PYTHONPATH in order to install it and still have
> >> the meta information at hand.
> >
> > And the advantage of manually doing this over having easy_install do it
> > would be...?
>
>* No magic, whatsoever.
>* No dependencies on a specific package manager.
>* No commands to learn.
>* No cluttering up PYTHONPATH.
>* No mangling of sys.path at runtime.
>* No Python installation slowdown due to frequent scans of ZIP files.
>
>I guess what I want to say is: eggs would become a no-strings-attached,
>easy to use drop-in install format.

Perhaps I was unclear.  My question is what benefit there was, compared to 
having easy_install (or any other tool) do the unzipping and rename 
EGG-INFO to Package-Version.egg-info?

Note also that unzipping an egg to a directory with the same name as its 
.egg file produces a similar result, but has the additional advantage of 
supporting a trivial uninstallation - with no package manager required for 
either installation or uninstallation.  So, the use case of "just unzip and 
go" actually works already, if you either manually add it to a .pth file or 
just use require() at runtime.