[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip)

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> In this context, eggs are "merely" the first (and most important)
[..]
> example of a format extension, and so should drive the development of
> a standard.
>
> To summarise:
>
> I believe that we need a statement of direction on the (zipped) egg
> format. I see a number of options:
>
> 1. Retain it as-is in Distribute, but deprecated and no further development.
> 2. Deprecate egg support in Distribute, and ultimately drop it.
> 3. Develop into a reference example of an extensible architecture for
> adding to PEP 376 support.
> 4. Extend PEP 376 support to eggs by means of egg-specific approaches
> hooking into distutils.
[..]
> I'm willing to help work on option (3).

I think PEP 376 needs first to be finished with only one installation
format, without thinking about adding an extensible architecture for
various formats. That's what I meant when I said I wanted to reduce
its scope.

Besides, I think the same site-packages should stick with a single
installation format for the distributions it contains. Although, I can
picture that a site-packages could be stored in a totally different
way, possibly in a database, or with only eggs, but I am still fuzzy
about what would this mean for PEP 376, and the stdlib itself.
(pkgutil+distutils)

And as you said earlier, this could be done later in a second phase,
once PEP 376 APIs (that are not directly related to the format, but
rather to what people do with installed distributions metadata) are
stabilized and proven to work.

Tarek