[Distutils] setuptools for people behind a firewall

[Paul Moore]

On 7/13/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 03:00 PM 7/13/2005 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
> >On 7/12/05, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Given a Distribution object (maybe derived from a user's command line,
> >maybe from selection off a GUI) I can "uninstall" the Distribution by
> >simply removing the egg (file or directory).
> 
> Make sure you *only* do this to a directory if it has a '.egg' extension;
> otherwise you could delete a package installed using "develop"!

Hmm, I'm only looking on sys.path - I hadn't imagined that development
software would be added to the *default* sys.path...

But I take your point. Actually, as I'm only looking at these
utilities from the POV of managing site-packages, maybe I should just
strip out any entries from sys.path which aren't under that directory
(although I don't know if I can find that directory on Unix - on
Windows, it's under sys.(exec)prefix, but I don't know directory
structures under Unix so well). I'll have to check the source of
easy_install to see how it decides where to copy files *to* (in the
absence of user overrides...)

[... omitted some stuff about PthDistributions which I need to review ...]

> >3. Can eggs be in site-packages, but not locatable via find_distribution?
> 
> Um, only if you don't look for them.  I'm not sure I understand the question.

Sorry - I'm doing find_distribution() on every entry in sys.path. What
I was getting at, is whether that process could miss any eggs which
easy_install may have put into site-packages.

Again, the key point I forgot to clarify is that I want to keep track
of "things that easy_install could have added to site-packages" - as
I'm trying to add tools to do the operations easy_install doesn't
supply (list, uninstall are the key ones) so that there's no
requirement for the user to manually work inside site-packages.

> >I can't see anything in the Distribution API documentation, and I'm a
> >little hazy on what happens in the face of multiple Distributions of
> >the same package, all in site-packages at once but only one
> >"installed".
> 
> You mean only one "activated" (they're all "installed").  What happens is
> that when you find_distributions('site-packages') they will all be
> listed.  However, when you find_distributions() on the path entry that
> makes a particular one current, that one will show up again.

Ah, OK. That helps me understand the reason for the doubled entries
mentioned above as well.

Thanks,
Paul.