[Distutils] Eggs vs bdist_wininst (Was: Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip))

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So why is there a need for an egg binary format on Windows?
>>
>> I think the only extra specific feature bdist_egg provides is the
>> ability to use the self-contained
>> egg (zipped or not) directly in sys.path without having to install it
>> in a site-packages like directory.
>>
>> That's how zc.buildout works for example to isolate an execution
>> environment : it collects eggs in a directory called 'eggs', then
>> creates scripts with a modified sys.path that lists the paths of each
>> egg located in 'eggs'.
>
> That's a feature of the installed (multi-version) egg, not the
> distribution format.  That feature can be kept (or discussed, or
> whatever) separately from the discussion of bdist_egg as a
> distribution format.

The bdist_egg distribution format, an 'egg', can be used directly in a
Python interpreter
without having to install it at all :

$ wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/W/Wally/Wally-0.6.4-py2.6.egg
$ python
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.insert(0, 'Wally-0.6.4-py2.6.egg')
>>> import wally
>>> wally
<module 'wally' from 'Wally-0.6.4-py2.6.egg/wally/__init__.py'>


Tarek