[Pythonmac-SIG] [Fwd: Re: [Matplotlib-users] Installation Problems on Mac OS X]

[Jacob Rus]

Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Yes, it is, and there's an example in the py2app sources that does
> exactly that.. but it falls apart if you need options or if you have
> proxy issues. Additionally, the common use case is "easy_install name"
> rather than "easy_install
> i_went_through_the_trouble_to_download_this_file_to_my_harddrive.egg"
> so it proved to be rather useless in a general context (for anyone
> that knows about easy_install a priori).

I'm actually just in this to find a place to put the egg icon. :p  But 
it seems, on general principle, that it would be good to have some app 
that knows what egg files are to associate with launch services, even if 
all it does is pop up an informative message that says "run the 
following command from the terminal…" or something.  I'm really not 
joking about this one.  Users new to python have no idea what a .egg 
file is, and there's nothing that I could find in the standard python 
docs about what they are or how to use them (For instance, neither the 
[Installing Python Modules][ipm] page, nor the Library Reference, nor 
the Tutorial makes any mention of eggs).  Double clicking an egg file 
currently pops up a message that the system doesn't know what it is.

The whole point of eggs is that they're supposed to make life *easy*, 
and *just work*.

[ipm]: http://python.org/doc/current/inst/inst.html

Further down the line, it would be neat to have some sort of GUI app for 
browsing through python packages.  I don't know exactly what eggs look 
like internally, but it's my understanding that they contain code, plus 
information about dependencies, etc?  Maybe we could make a cocoa app 
for looking through all the installed packages on a user's computer, 
with a web view showing docstrings pulled out of the code, or even a 
text view showing the full code itself.  This app could show which 
packages were installed with which python version, and exactly where 
they were located on disk, etc.

I propose the name `Egg Basket.app`. :)

Maybe this is too much to dream, as no one really has the time to make 
such a thing.  But we're Mac users here.  We should strive for 
discoverable, clear, intuitive interfaces, even when it comes to 
programming.

-Jacob