[Distutils] Seeking the Essence of the Concept of an Egg

Jeff Rush jeff at taupro.com
Thu Feb 28 11:46:57 CET 2008


In preparing for a tutorial on Python eggs, I'm wrestling with the *precise* 
definition of a "Python egg".  It appears to be a slippery term from the 
various documentation:

   "There are several binary formats that embody eggs, but the most
    common is '.egg' zipfile format, because it's a convenient one
    for distributing projects. All of the formats support including
    package-specific data, project-wide metadata, C extensions, and
    Python code."

Ok, so what binary formats -other than- .egg files are actually eggs?  I 
figure RPMs, .debs, etc. are eggs, as long as they have an EGG-INFO 
subdirectory and conform to certain basic structural rules.

   "Eggs are pluggable distributions in one of the three formats
    currently supported by ``pkg_resources``.  There are built
    eggs, development eggs, and egg links."

Hmmm, so it's not just binary distributions that can be eggs, but also 
egg-links and development eggs.  The concept of a "built egg" egg still 
includes an RPM or .deb though.

   "Python Eggs are the preferred binary distribution format for
    EasyInstall, because they are cross-platform (for "pure"
    packages), directly importable, and contain project metadata
    including scripts and information about the project's
    dependencies. They can be simply downloaded and added to
    sys.path directly, or they can be placed in a directory on
    sys.path and then automatically discovered by the egg
    runtime system."

Well drat, so RPMs and .debs are -not- eggs, because you don't just place them 
on sys.path directly to use them.  Egg-links don't quite fit that definition 
either, unless you look at them funny.  So what -other- binary format could 
that first paragraph be talking about that can be dropped onto sys.path and be 
picked up by Python?

-Jeff

Python eggs are so very zen; you can only understand them by already 
understanding them.


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