[Distutils] Egg support for system packages (including bdist_wininst)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 12:48 PM 12/22/2005 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>> I'd just wish that this would be the default and the .egg ZIP
>> file installation approach be made an option.
>>
>> setuptools would then finally be compatible to the rest of the
>> distutils world again and avoid all the added overhead and
>> problems of ZIP file imports.
>>
>> Perhaps you could have two commands, e.g. the default install
>> would create the normal package directory (with added .egg-info
>> dir) and a new install_eggfile to install the .egg ZIP file
>> instead.
> 
> The only way this could happen is to add a manifest of installed files,
> in order to allow uninstallation and upgrades to be made safe in the
> absence of a packaging system. 

Sure, why not put this manifest into the .egg-info dir ?!

The advantage of the .egg-info dir is that it's easy
to find using package introspection.

> The .egg file/directory technique
> currently makes uninstallation as simple as "rm -rf
> package-version.egg", and multi-version installs work with no special
> action.
>
> Note, too, that using .egg files or directories means that installation
> *never breaks existing programs* as long as they have specified their
> dependencies accurately.  Traditional distutils installation is
> destructive in the absence of a system packager.
>
> However, if you *have* a system packager, then you should not be using
> "setup.py install" anyway, so I'm not sure I see how this is an issue. 

The issue is that "setup.py install" should continue to
install things the (one-and-only) Python way. Any different
way should use a different command name.

You are currently overloading the install command with a
completely different approach, which is not compatible to
the standard distutils system or the Python import mechanism.

> You should be simply building system packages.  And it's quite
> straightforward to make most bdist_* commands work: bdist_wininst and
> bdist_dumb work with setuptools "out of the box" because they call the
> "install" command internally; only bdist_rpm required some
> monkeypatching to add --single-version-externally-managed, because it
> writes script files that run "install" later.
> 
> Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, if you want traditional
> distutils-style installation, you should use system packages, since
> they're the only way to allow uninstallation and avoid corrupted
> upgrades.  Otherwise, you should use .egg files or directories, in which
> case easy_install (and in the future, nest) will be your package manager.

I guess what I want to say is that I only want to be forced to
use the easy_install package manager (or any other
non-system package manager) if I have a need or requirement
for the features it offers.

The egg format is not too far away from being a nice drop-in
format for Python binary extensions.

All it takes is:

* making sure that an unzip will create a
  proper Python package (with the meta information embedded
  into it)

With this changes, I think that eggs could actually
become a prime distribution format - even for system
extensions since it then no longer interferes with
the system installer mechanisms.

BTW, in case you still don't believe that placing ZIP
files on PYTHONPATH causes a slowdown, just install
10-20 eggs on PYTHONPATH and then do a

python -v

Python will tell you that it scanned all the ZIP files
on startup - even before having imported any of the
system lib modules such as warnings. Note that disabling
the import of site.py doesn't change this (python -S -v).

Here's an example with 20 eggs (using C shell):

tmp/eggs/> setenv PYTHONPATH
egg1.egg:egg10.egg:egg11.egg:egg12.egg:egg13.egg:egg14.egg:egg15.egg:egg16.egg:egg17.egg:egg18.egg:egg19.egg:egg2.egg:egg20.egg:egg3.egg:egg4.egg:egg5.egg:egg6.egg:egg7.egg:egg8.egg:egg9.egg
tmp/eggs> time python -S -c '0'
0.014u 0.006s 0:00.02 50.0%     0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
tmp/eggs> unsetenv PYTHONPATH
tmp/eggs> time python -S -c '0'
0.006u 0.003s 0:00.01 0.0%      0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

System time for startup doubles.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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