[Python-Dev] [Distutils] how to easily consume just the parts of eggs that are good for you

[Alexander Michael]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>  That is indeed a problem -- but it's a social one, not a technical
>  one.  It's trivial for the publisher of an egg to change their
>  command line from "setup.py bdist_egg upload" to "setup.py sdist
>  bdist_egg upload", as soon as their users (politely) request that they do so.

I know you say it in
<http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#distributing-a-setuptools-based-project>,
but perhaps you should be more explicit about the best practice being
to distribute an sdist as well as one or more eggs and highlight this
with some standout text like:

"""
When uploading your project to PyPI, always upload your sdist in
addition to any eggs unless you have a good idiosyncratic reason not
to. The easy_install tool can also download and install sdist's on all
platforms (universally for pure-python packages and provided compilers
are available for distributions containing python extensions), so
uploading them gives your project the widest possible audience.
"""

Perhaps this will help some the social challenges.

Regards,
Alex