[Distutils] idea for Distribute: make unzipped eggs be the default

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

I have been keeping a running tally of people who have trouble with  
zipped eggs and the trouble goes away when they have unzipped eggs  
instead.  I just added the newest entry: someone was trying to build  
a package with py2exe, and configuring their distutils config file to  
always unzip eggs fixed the problem:

http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue33 # zipped eggs cause various  
problems -- perhaps set default setting to unzipped?

Perhaps the Distribute project should consider installing eggs  
unzipped by default.  It would avoid a slew of problems (see that  
ticket for a catalog of problems), would be fully backwards  
compatible (it is what many people already do, per the suggested  
workaround, and I've never heard a report of a problem due to an  
*unzipped* egg), and I think it might improve performance a bit.   
(Yes, that's right -- we haven't done a real measurement of  
performance, but the few times that people briefly glanced at  
performance it seemed like zipping the eggs made them slower to load,  
not faster.)

Regards,

Zooko