[Distutils] Are egg files needed when building/installing via --root?

[Josselin Mouette]

Le samedi 29 novembre 2008 à 09:39 -0800, Brian Cameron a écrit :
> > I'm aware of three linux distributions that used to strip out .egg-info 
> > files and then changes their policy and now leave them unmolested: 
> > Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu.

Actually we still strip out the infamous "-py2.X" suffix. (If files are
different from a Python version to another, there are already better
mechanisms to deal with this.)

The reason we used to strip them was, IIRC, that in early versions it
was not possible to ship this information as files; the package had to
be shipped as an egg to work correctly. Since they can be shipped
in .egg-info directories, this is not really a big issue to ship them.

> Interesting, what sort of problems did the distros run into if they
> removed the files?  That would be the sort of information that would
> be useful to add to the manual, I think.

When stripping .egg-info files, you run into problems with useless code
that checks for dependencies (while the packaging system already checks
for them), so you have to strip such code as well. You also run into
issues with packages that use egg information to look for plugins.

For packages that use the easy_install insanity, this is even worse,
since they can start downloading packages by mistakenly thinking their
dependencies are missing. This mechanism is also disabled now, but it’s
better not risking to run into it.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.
: :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.
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