[Distutils] zc.buildout likes to download eggs...

[Martin Aspeli]

... which is great, but say I have 10 buildouts all using all the eggs 
from zope and plone (either explicitly or as dependencies). I'd rather 
not replicate this in every buildout.

I think there are two concerns here:

  - bandwidth: My ISP gets funny when I go over 20Gb/mo
  - disk space: A lot of information could be duplicated

Are there any facilities to share eggs among packages (I have a feeling 
Jim implied there isn't yet)?

If not, what would such a facility look like?

For the bandwidth part, perhaps it could be some kind of local 
repository of eggs (but how to stop zc.buildout being over-zealous and 
getting eggs again thinking something may be newer?).

For the disk space part, I'm guessing we'd need a shared "eggs" 
directory. I imagine I could specify eggs-directory as an absolute or 
relative path, e.g. ../shared-eggs. I don't know whether one buildout 
would clear out eggs from another one and so on in this scenario, though.

Martin