[Distutils] SETUPTOOLS - Loading Eggs which do not have an egg_info

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:24 PM 12/8/2006 +0200, Ilias Lazaridis wrote:
>My requirement is to have no additional installation steps after an
>svn-checkout (or unzip).

Then generate the .egg-info before committing to SVN, or use the "sdist" 
command to create your source zipfiles or tarballs, and all will be well.


>The reason is "reduncancy", which I like to avoid.
>
>For simple plugins, the information is already given within "setup.py",
>thus duplicating it into an egg-info is "duplicating information".

Perhaps you should then also patch Python to avoid generating .pyc and .pyo 
files, since these are redundant in the same way and for the same reason.  :)



>As said, as a user I am very happy with setuptools. As a developer, I
>would like to have more simplicity for simple use cases. I think
>removing the need for an egg-info would be the first step.

Generated egg-info is a feature, not a bug.  Note that in order to use the 
information from the setup.py, you must import huge amounts of setuptools 
and distutils code, whereas normal egg operations require only the single 
pkg_resources module.

If a project uses custom egg-info or other setuptools extensions, you must 
import those as well.  All of this, to avoid writing some data to disk that 
could then be read simply and directly without involving any of those other 
imports!  The redundancy you're complaining about is a major enhancement to 
startup performance.

As I've said, an ability to auto-generate egg_info if a setup.py is newer 
than the corresponding PKG-INFO might be a useful feature.  However, trying 
to do without generating it at all, simply isn't going to happen.