[Distutils] Setuptools: omit namespace package directories?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:42 PM 2/9/2007 -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
>This makes this approach uninteresting for buildout, which doesn't
>write to site-packages or have any site-packages equivalent.
>
>It sound like it also violates the egg promise that you just have to
>put the egg in sys.path for it to be useable.  buildout relies on
>this promise.

Well, the backward-compatibility mode is for making system packages like 
.rpm files, and the namespace package support for that is a hack to deal 
with the fact that such packaging tools don't like to have multiple .rpm's 
or whatever containing the same file (i.e. the namespace package's 
__init__.py).

This would be an even more extreme hack, if we tried to support 'develop' 
mode for procrustean package_dirs setups.  You do, however, make a good 
point regarding the egg promise.  As far as I can see, then, there is no 
way to support crazy package_dirs in combination with namespace packages, 
without automatically creating a bunch of directories and __init__.py 
files, along with some other crazy hacks.  So the idea is probably a dead duck.