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

[Nathan Yergler]

You should probably leave them intact -- they add metadata about the
packages and allow setuptools/easy_install/pkg_resources/etc to use
those installed packages when resolving dependencies.

Nathan

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Brian Cameron <Brian.Cameron at sun.com> wrote:
>
> Last October, I sent an email to this list asking how to install modules
> which use setuputils so that modules are shipped in a way that is compatible
> with Solaris packaging.  It was recommended to me to run "setup.py install"
> with the "--root=/foo" argument and this causes the files to be installed
> directly to the filesystem and not in an Egg format.
>
> For example, when installing cssutils this way, it installs the python files
> to /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cssutils, and not in Egg format.  This
> seems to work great, so thanks for the help with that.
>
> However, installing this way seems to also install various egg related files
> which I am not sure are actually needed when delivering in this manner.  For
> example, installing CSSutils or simplejson puts directories with names like
> these on the filesystem:
>
>  /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/cssutils-0.9.5.1-py2.4.egg-info
>  /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/simplejson-2.0.4-py2.4.egg-info
>
> These directories contain files like PKG-INFO, SOURCES.txt,
> dependency_links.txt, entry_points.txt, and top_level.txt.
>
> Is there any value in shipping these files when not delivering as Eggs, or
> could they safely be just removed?  Should they not be installed when
> building with the "--root" option, or is there some other way to disable
> having them be installed?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian
>
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