[Distutils] easy_install: application description files

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:41 PM 7/20/2005 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>For reasons actually unrelated to easy_install, I'm going to be adding
>files describing applications at work.  These files contain all sorts of
>company-specific metadata.  I'd like to include descriptions of
>dependencies, for use by various tools (or maybe just by easy_install,
>should it do everything I want).
>
>Right now all the metadata goes in setup(), which is perhaps okay, but
>requires distutils/setuptools to implement all the features, because the
>file itself isn't (realistically) parseable without running it.  But in
>this context an ini file would probably be better.  Phillip, I know you
>like the ini files, so you must have something in mind for this.  I'm
>not seeing anything particular in the documentation, though.
>
>Or do I put everything in setup() and use some of the files produced by
>that?  I see .egg-info/requires.txt contains the requirement information
>(BTW, it's missing a trailing newline).  Should I just use that
>directory as my application-metadata storage area?

Yes.


>   Would I add that directory to my repository?

Yes.


>If so, is it recommended I ignore top_level.txt and requires.txt as 
>derivative?

That's up to you.  They're overwritten whenever setuptools does something 
that needs them.   (That goes for the PKG-INFO file as well.)


>Completely unrelated, easy_install installs executable .pyc files.  Is
>that intended?  They actually don't seem to be .pyc files either, just
>copies of the .py files.

Ah, I see it now; if you name a script with a .py extension in an egg 
that's unpacked to a directory, it ends up compiling the script during the 
byte-compilation pass, and then the script installation pass thinks they're 
two scripts.  I'll fix this in CVS sometime tonight.