[Distutils] list and remove packages with easy_install?

[Thomas Heller]

Ok, easy_install is really cool.

Installing most of the packages (*) that one needs with easy_install
makes the wish grow to use easy_install as a complete solution.

So, why can't easy_install manage the packages that I have installed in
these ways:

- list the packages that I have installed
- remove one of them (completely!) if I don't want to use it any longer.

Ok, easy_install -m package removes if from the .pth file, but it is
still there on disk.  Same if I upgrade a package to a newer version;
old versions are left in Lib/site-packages.

It looks like all the information that is needed to implement the above
two features - is there a reason why this isn't implemented?


(*) The one that I rememeber which failed badly was pychecker.
IIRC, I ended with batch files in Python24\scripts that contained Python code.
But maybe that's pychecker's fault, not easy_install's.