[Distutils] py2app and eggs part deux

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:29 PM 7/12/2005 -1000, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>Well, just do the second suggestion then.  "Install" the eggs
>somewhere, unzipped, and make sure it's on sys.path during setup.py.
>Maybe you could crank the ez_setup wheels (or whatever module is
>appropriate, I haven't looked at eggs yet) at the top of your
>setup.py and automate this.

Well, if it just has to be on sys.path during setup.py, then it should be 
working now, shouldn't it?  I mean, if he installed them to Python's 
site-packages.  In the alternative, he could create a wrapper command that 
calls require("project==version") to find all the eggs and put them on 
sys.path.

So, I guess my suggestion to Kevin is to try installing to a directory on 
sys.path, using the new --always-unzip option to force the packages to be 
unzipped, and then try hacking py2app to do a require() before looking for 
dependencies (consulting the setuptools "test" command for an example).

I suspect this means that the packages will get merged into one another 
with no distinction at runtime, but whatever works, works.

One interesting thing that eggs do, however, in the problem of 
module-finding is that they potentially reduce the question to one of just 
identifying what portions of the standard library each egg uses, which in 
some ways is a significantly easier problem because import tricks (e.g. 
dynamic imports, exec's, etc.) involving the standard library occur far 
less often.  It might be worth adding something modulegraph-ish to 
setuptools to support this, although it's not at the top of my list right now.