[Distutils] Can you collapse easy-install.pth somehow?

[skip at pobox.com]

So I have rather casually installed a bunch of packages from PyPI using
easy_install.  It now contains 23 eggs, all of which get used a bit, but
nowhere near as often as the standard lib or our internal stuff.
Unsuccessfully stat()ing in all those egg directories was really starting to
hammer our NFS server (we often start up hundreds of Python processes at a
time), so I commented out the second import line at the end which serves to
leave the eggs at the end of sys.path.  Now every time I install a package I
have to quickly edit easy-install.path to remove the import line the install
process adds.

I wonder though...  Is there some alternate way to install stuff from PyPI
which reduces the number of directories on sys.path?  Maybe some
post-processing step which takes the current set of eggs, creates a single
directory into which they are all unfolded?  That single directory could
then be added to sys.path.

Am I making sense?  It's late.  I might well not be.  If so, ask me for a
more complete explanation of the idea floating around my brain.

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/