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

[Jim Fulton]

I think that the confusion comes from the blurring of eggs and  
setuptools.  IMO, when most people use the term "egg", they are really  
referring to the packaging system provided by setuptools and  
easy_install (and the other applications, like buildout) that build on  
setuptools).  IMO, the actual distribution format isn't that  
important. Source distributions have advantages over eggs for  
distribution in many cases, but what's really important is setuptools.

Jim

On Feb 28, 2008, at 5:46 AM, Jeff Rush wrote:

> 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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--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation