[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Josselin Mouette]

Le dimanche 27 novembre 2005 à 22:49 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> Just a reminder: without the .egg-info metadata (or something similar), we 
> aren't fulfilling one of the primary use cases, which is Debian users 
> wanting their bleeding-edge installs to not duplicate stable packages.
> 
> This is probably the number one gripe of Debian users on the TurboGears 
> mailing list: "why doesn't easy_install see my Debian ElementTree package?" 
> (or some other dependency).  They don't seem to mind easy_install adding 
> stuff to /usr/local that there's not a Debian system package for, but 
> they'd like it to be able to "see" the Debian packages they've installed 
> and not rebuild/reinstall them.

I see it as a flaw in the way eggs work, not in our Debian packages. You
shouldn't forget Debian stable isn't going to move for still about a
year. Even if we add one of your suggested hacks to unstable packages,
sarge users still won't be able to install such packages, and that's the
same for stable RHEL users, for example.

> (One of their other big complaints would be fixed by having Debian set 
> distutils.cfg such that the default install location for distutils stuff is 
> /usr/local/.../site-packages, rather than /usr.  But I gather one such user 
> opened a bug for this issue separately, though.)

This is indeed a valid complaint.
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
   `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom