Squisher -- a lightweight, self-contained alternative to eggs?

[Adam Atlas]

Ah... heh, sorry, I misread your message as "a much more convenient
way" rather than "much more than a convenient way". Anyway, I
understand that, and I do indeed find setuptools useful and use it on
a regular basis.

But my other points still stand. This would be a moot point if
setuptools were part of the standard library, but it's not, and I
don't see why people should have to bother installing it if they
simply want to try a small package. Look at Beautiful Soup, for
example. It's distributed as a single .py file, and that's great. With
most modules, all I want to do is download them and plop them into my
project directory. You can always copy it into site-packages if you
want to access it globally, and you can always unzip it if you need to
see the source.

So I *will* retract my statement that this could be an "alternative"
to eggs -- ideally, it would be an addition, since it doesn't break
compatibility at all. You could download an egg and rename it to .pyc,
and import it like any other module, and at any point later, you could
rename it back to .egg and use setuptools to install it if you wish.