[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:08 PM 11/27/2005 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>Removing the dependency checks entirely and replacing them with Debian
>dependencies is definitely an option, and I happen to prefer it slightly
>to the necessity of adding empty .egg-info files to all python module
>packages.

Just a reminder: without the .egg-info metadata (or something similar), we 
aren't fulfilling one of the primary use cases, which is Debian users 
wanting their bleeding-edge installs to not duplicate stable packages.

This is probably the number one gripe of Debian users on the TurboGears 
mailing list: "why doesn't easy_install see my Debian ElementTree package?" 
(or some other dependency).  They don't seem to mind easy_install adding 
stuff to /usr/local that there's not a Debian system package for, but 
they'd like it to be able to "see" the Debian packages they've installed 
and not rebuild/reinstall them.

(One of their other big complaints would be fixed by having Debian set 
distutils.cfg such that the default install location for distutils stuff is 
/usr/local/.../site-packages, rather than /usr.  But I gather one such user 
opened a bug for this issue separately, though.)