[Distutils] Questions about Python Eggs

[Ian Bicking]

So, I'm looking at Python Eggs, and I have some questions...

Why does it create a Package.egg-info/ directory?  It seems odd; is this 
meant to replace all the metadata arguments to setup.py?  That would be 
fine, I'm happy to get rid of those arguments, but if it's just a copy 
of that data it seems odd to install it alongside the distribution files.

I think I'm generally going to prefer non-zip installations of Eggs, 
this way I can apply it to projects that weren't written to use 
pkg_resource, and people can see the source more easily.  By any chance 
does anyone have code on hand to unpack an egg appropriately?  I'm sure 
it's not hard, but it's not a one-liner I'm trying to cut down on the 
typing...

What's the state of depends?  What is depends anyway?

I notice the comment on pkg_resources.require aren't very confident ;) 
It actually doesn't look functional to me, though I haven't tried 
running it.  Is it just meant to raise an ImportError when a requirement 
isn't met, or can it search some directories for appropriate Egg files? 
  This is something I'm very interested in, so if I have the intention 
correct I'd like to help move this function along.

Anyway ideas about how to apply setuptools to other people's packages? 
Is it safe to do nasty monkeypatching wherein I replace distutils.setup 
with setuptools.setup?  Or, more directly, anyone have code around to 
build eggs programmatically from other people's packages?

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  / http://blog.ianbicking.org