[Distutils] setuptools, removing installed eggs

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:42 AM 2/19/2008 -0800, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I am trying to write a script that removes all traces of an egg.
>I am not talking about a clever thing that follows dependencies,
>but I have faced issues where my fellow developers had a remaining
>"develop" eggs that had to be removed.

Develop eggs can (and should!) be uninstalled using "setup.py develop -u".


>So an "easy_remove" script that cleanly erase all occurences of a given egg
>would be good ihmo.
>
>In my understanding, the script should:
>
>- scan all entries in pkg_resources.working_set.entries, to get all
>instances
>   of the given egg (folder, archive and link)
>
>- call easy_install -m package
>
>- remove all entries founded before.
>
>Is that right ?

It would probably be simpler to just read and edit a specific 
easy-install.pth file, using ``pkg_resources.find_distributions(path, 
True)``.  If you find a matching distribution, remove the line from 
the file, and the egg file/directory if appropriate.

(Of course, you will need to skip lines beginning with "import ", and 
leave them in place.)

If you want to remove all eggs for a project, whether active or not, 
you can indeed scan everything on sys.path.  The easiest way to do 
that is just to do:

     for dist in pkg_resources.Environment()[project_name]:
         # rm -rf dist.location if appropriate

Of course, you will need to make sure you only delete a distribution 
(in either case) if ``dist.precedence==pkg_resources.EGG_DIST``.