[Tutor] Regarding installing a python package

Laura Creighton lac at openend.se
Tue Sep 29 13:20:16 CEST 2015


In a message of Mon, 28 Sep 2015 19:28:47 -0700, Chirag Shahani writes:
>Hi,
>
>Could any one please help me understand the following:
>
>Suppose I install a python package using python setup.py install provided
>by the developer of a package. I need to track that changes in my file
>system.. meaning what new directories and files got created? Also, what is
>the concept of the egg file that gets created? What would be the location
>of this egg file and how would it be named ****.egg? Also, the ***.egg-info
>directory?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>--
>Chirag

This is a useful package to install.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog
It will happily log all changes to your filesystem, or only in the places
you are interested in watching.

However, the desire to do such a thing often means that your real
problem is that you are using python setup.py to install packages.

This can be ok if that is what you want to do, but it may be that
in your case what you want to do instead is to make a virtual
environment and install your package(s) there.   This means you can
keep your system, global-wide environment pure, uncluttered with
packages, and have a separate virtualenv for each combination of
python packages you want to work with together.  And you don't have
to worry about which things got installed globally at all -- because
none of them do.  

Laura


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