[Distutils] [Python-Dev] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you

[Chris McDonough]

zooko wrote:
> Folks:
> 
> Here is a simple proposal:  make the standard Python "import"  
> mechanism notice eggs on the PYTHONPATH and insert them (into the  
> *same* location) on the sys.path.
> 
> This eliminates the #1 problem with eggs -- that they don't easily  
> work when installing them into places other than your site-packages  
> and that if you allow any of them to be installed on your system then  
> they take precedence over your non-egg packages even you explicitly  
> put those other packages earlier in your PYTHONPATH.  (That latter  
> behavior is very disagreeable to more than a few prorgammers.)

Sorry if I'm out of the loop and there's some subtlety here that I'm 
disregarding, but it doesn't appear that either of the issues you mention is a 
actually problem with eggs.  These are instead problems with how eggs get 
installed by easy_install (which uses a .pth file to extend sys.path).  It's 
reasonable to put eggs on the PYTHONPATH manually (e.g. 
sys.path.append('/path/to/some.egg')) instead of using easy_install to install them.

I don't think there would be any benefit to changing Python's import machinery 
to deal with them; they are essentially just directories (or zipfiles) that 
contain packages.

- C