[Distutils] eggs: Python version independence

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:12 AM 7/4/2005 +0100, Clayton Brown wrote:
>Ill probably extend this to also use wget and keep a repository of all
>source packages, but recall seing this functionality in easy_install
>itself - and since it has better dig options etc best use it i think,

Right now the closest thing is to use the -b option, and the downloaded 
file will be left in the build directory.  But that won't help your script 
find and reuse the download, I'm afraid.


>long term i would like to use the (-m) option by default to always
>maintain mutliple versions of a package, but in my first attempt this
>require() method described failed to import the package that i had
>installed multiple versions of.

What happened instead?


>Ideally python itself could be extended with the functionality
>easy_install provides, particularly to resolve latest version when not
>specified, and to alllow version specification at run time.

It does allow version specification at runtime; in fact there are already 
hooks that can be used to make require() automatically run easy_install, 
and these hooks are in fact already used to install packages' declared 
dependencies.

However, these hooks have to be explicitly activated; simply building this 
capability into Python's default behavior would be an extreme security risk.