[Distutils] Best practices for creating eggs?

[Paul Moore]

On 6/28/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> I assume that most people will read the docs on the web, and that if they
> want the documentation source, they will download the "sdist" distribution
> that I always upload alongside of the eggs.

I work offline sufficiently often that not having local documentation
is frustrating. There's no standard for local docs, which is a
nuisance, and makes for an inconsistent story between different
packages, but I'd be concerned if setuptools made it more difficult to
bundle local docs.

An example - cx_Oracle provides a full set of HTML documentation which
the bdist_wininst installer drops in C:\Python24\cx_Oracle-doc. The
one time I tried using easy_install to convert this to an egg, the
documentation got missed out. I've never retried the experiment,
however, so things could well have changed, as this was quite a while
ago.

And of course, eggs which get installed as zip files don't really
offer anywhere to *put* documentation which is accessible (web
browsers can't load HTML out of zip files, for example).

Paul.