[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Robert Kern]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 11:36 AM 11/24/2005 -0800, Robert Kern wrote:

>>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?
> 
> The sticking point is the relative relationship to a sys.path directory 
> (line 2 of requirement 1, above).  Since a program such as Trac can 
> legitimately manipulate sys.path to e.g. add plugin directories, we need to 
> be able to do some reasonable transformation to *every* sys.path entry, 
> preferably without introducing some kind of distro-specific configuration 
> to match special directories and redirect them.  We really want to treat 
> every sys.path entry as a valid place to find a project's metadata, since 
> each is a valid place for the actual packages to live.

I'm not suggesting that /usr/share/.../ should be the only place to find
 .egg-info directories. Simply that pkg_resources would scan
sys.path+['/usr/share/.../'] and treat the ones found in /usr/share/.../
as if they were in /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/. Everywhere else
that a user could put Python packages (e.g.
/usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/) is fine to put whatever the
user wants. Eggs, .egg-info/; it doesn't matter. It doesn't need an
alternate location. Debian packages need to be more disciplined, but all
Debianized Python packages are installed to
/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/ so we only need the one alias, not many.

It's possible that only the DD in charge of packaging setuptools will
have to concern himself with coding this.

-- 
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