[Distutils] What role to eggs still play?

Daniel Holth dholth at gmail.com
Fri Aug 19 18:54:16 EDT 2016


Pip uses pkg-resources to enumerate the installed packages.

An advantage of building the installation metadata is when you decide to
change the format, like by adding toml for example 🌋

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016, 18:41 Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <
chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> Thanks, I think I'm getting it.
>
> About the toml file... the *-info metadata is a compiled artifact,
> according to all the existing Python packages. Most sdists even have a
> *.egg-info directory.
>
>
> If it's a compiled artifact, then shouldn't it NOT be in a source dist?
>
> It is inconvenient if you want to know the true dependencies without
> running setup.py.
>
>
> Isn't that what the toml file is for?
>
> I think we are stuck with it, and it's not all bad - if there is some
> useful metadata that doesn't affect the dependency resolver, and it is "too
> static" or too cumbersome to write out by hand, there's a place to do that.
>
>
> I'm trying to imagine what that info would be,  but I suppose there could
> be meta data about a package that is generated at build time -- maybe info
> about how it was built, for instance.
>
> Hmm -- maybe you could put info in there about non-Python shared libs it's
> linked to, for instance.
>
> Eggs are the only way to add a zipped distribution to PYTHONPATH and have
>> setuptools find the metadata
>>
>
> Can pip find it in a zipped package? Remember,  I don't care to support
> setuptools only features anyway :-)
>
> . Eggs are used by buildout, especially in the unzipped into a directory
>> form
>>
> And they could still be used for their originally designed use as a plugin
>> format.
>>
>
> If pkg_resources gets spun off, would it support that?
>
>  *.egg-info or EGG-INFO is the predecessor of the *.dist-info format
>> designed in PEP-376. You get *.egg-info whenever you install something
>> with setuptools without going through bdist_wheel.
>>
>
> So setuptools_lite would write a  dist_info.
>
> I take it pip looks for both?
>
>
>
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