[Distutils] What role to eggs still play?

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 10:41 AM Alex Grönholm <alex.gronholm at nextday.fi>
wrote:

> 20.08.2016, 01:41, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal kirjoitti:
>
> 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?
>
> Isn't the toml file for specifying build dependencies, rather then runtime
> dependencies?
>

It is only build dependencies now. Maybe he also anticipates the migration
of static setup() arguments into toml e.g.
https://bitbucket.org/dholth/pysdl2-cffi/src/tip/pyproject.toml . Not that
this would necessarily be in a standard format...

19.08.2016, 20:25, Daniel Holth kirjoitti:

Eggs are the only way to add a zipped distribution to PYTHONPATH and have
setuptools find the metadata (the Python code can be found with or without
the metadata; setuptools does not discover *.dist-info inside zip). 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.

Alex kirjoitti: "What is not clear to me is who needs this. Is this not
what virtualenvs are for? Or could wheels not be used for the same purpose?
What am I missing?"

What you are missing is that while they could in theory be used for the
same purpose, in practice there is a large group of Plone & buildout users
who are not using wheels for that. (And the wheels would have to be
unzipped into their own individual directories, but buildout almost always
unzips eggs lately too.)
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