[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Robert Kern]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> Note, by the way, that those two things are the only essentials here, as 
> best I can tell, and I've already stated my willingness to change *how* 
> those two things get accomplished.  For clarity, I will repeat yet again, 
> in yet another way:
> 
> 1. Egg-based projects need to install their published metadata, in a 
> well-known location relative to the installation location of their code, so 
> that it can be found by searching sys.path, so that it and other projects 
> can locate the metadata for currently-importable projects, *without* 
> needing to first import the project's code.
> 
> 2. Egg-based projects need to be able to identify whether another Python 
> project package is installed and what version it is, without requiring 
> modification to that other project's code or needing to import it.  (And 
> this is independent of whether the depended-on project was packaged as an 
> egg by its author.)
> 
> As far as I'm aware, those are the irreducible technical minimum 
> requirements for making an egg-based project work.  *How* these 
> requirements are met is quite flexible, as there are already three working 
> layouts that achieve this.  As I said before, I'm quite willing to 
> implement a fourth.  But nobody has been proposing anything that meets 
> these requirements, because they're too busy trying to prove the 
> requirements don't exist or are somehow not real.

[Note: I am a happy Debian user, though not a DD. I am also one of the
developers of a Debian-packaged Python package, and we're considering
using pkg_resources to implement certain new features. I swear, this is
like watching two parents fight. Anyways...]

I think one of the sticking points with the Debian developers has been
that the .egg-info metadata is being put into /usr/lib/... when
according to Debian policy and general UNIX lore, such should be placed
somewhere in /usr/share/.... Would it be possible to treat
/usr/share/pythonX.Y-egginfo/ as a proxy for
/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/ when searching for .egg-info directories?

-- 
Robert Kern
robert.kern at gmail.com

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
 Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
  -- Richard Harter