[Distutils] Why isn't a link given higher precedence than an egg

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:41 PM 5/24/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:

>In an egg directory, I have:
>
>    zc.buildout-0.1-py2.3.egg
>    zc.buildout.egg-link
>
>and the version the link is pointing to is 0.1.
>
>If en environment is asked to pick the best match, it picks
>zc.buildout-0.1-py2.3.egg.  Given that a link is the result of
>"setup.py develop", I would expect it to get preference bacause it
>reflects current developemnt.

Source distributions actually have *lower* precedence than egg binaries, if 
they have the same version number.  This is mainly a heuristic so that 
easy_install will not build a package from source if there's a compatible 
binary version available.

In typical usage, easy-install.pth sets which egg is the current default, 
thus sidestepping this ambiguity.