[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:10 AM 11/24/2005 -0800, Kurt Schwehr wrote:
>As a person who works as a packager with a debian based distribution (fink 
>on Mac OSX) I am glad to see this discussion.  I have no personal opinion 
>about python eggs, but would really like to find a way to get some nice 
>packages into the system and have been totally unable to figure out how to 
>deal with eggs.

At the moment, easy_deb appears to be the most immediately available option 
for creating debs that support all egg features, from both egg-based and 
non-egg-based Python packages.  If I understand Vincenzo correctly, 
easy_deb includes tools to allow switching the active package versions, 
although I don't know how or if it relates to dpkg-divert and the 
"alternatives" system, as I'm not a Debian user myself.


>I see the point of allowing developers to have multiple versions of 
>packages when testing, but we definitely want to avoid that in the actual 
>fink tree at all costs.  It would be great to have a build system that can 
>switch between what we need as stable distribution packagers and what 
>people want/need in their local trees.  My hope is that eggs in the long 
>run can help the packagers track dependencies, but still let the packagers 
>handle those dependencies.

On Mac OS X, we recommend that users install to 
~/Library/Python2.x/site-packages, as this is private to the user and 
already supports .pth files.  That way, they can switch between versions at 
will.  See also:

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall#non-root-installation

I would be happy to answer any questions or hear any concerns you may have 
about how any of this works or how you'd like it to.  Thanks.