[Distutils] How to make easy_install handle platlibs?

[P.J. Eby]

At 11:16 AM 4/13/2009 -0700, Buck wrote:
>On Apr 12, 8:51 am, Tres Seaver <tsea... at palladion.com> wrote:
> > zooko wrote:
> > >> It would probably be a lot easier to improve the platform string
> > >> generation and comparison logic, as has been done for OS X.
> >
> > > However, it (egg naming scheme on Linux) currently doesn't.
> > > Eggs built on Linux are named something like py2.5-Linux-x86_64.
> > > ...
> >
> > Better:  just don't distribute binary eggs for Linux at all:
> >
> >  - Developers have the tools (or can install them) to build from
> >    'sdists'.
> >
> >  - Systems without tools are "locked down", which means that they
> >    shouldn't be installing from public distributions anyway:
> >    the folks who run them should be able to build *private* eggs
> >    from 'sdists' which are known to work for their systems.
> >
> > Tres.
>
>I have no clue what you mean by 'sdists'. Is this a widely-known
>thing?
>A URL to an example would be sufficient.

An sdist is a source distribution, usually in .tgz or .zip 
form.  Sdists contain certain well-defined directory layouts and 
files.  In particular:

* the entire contents are in a subdirectory named for the project and version

* that subdirectory contains a setup.py and a PKG-INFO

easy_install and pip can both find and retrieve sdists from PyPI and 
install them, they just go about the actual installation process a 
bit differently.