[Distutils] Design rationale for the egg format ?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi,

I have a few questions about the egg format implementation, and was
hoping people who designed it could answer them:
 - why does the filename encode some metadata (which python version if
the package contains extensions, platform specifier) ?
 - why are the metadata split into files instead of one single metadata file ?

I tried to find a rationale for those, but could not find much info on
distutils-sig or setuptools doc,

thanks,

David