[Distutils] repeatable and updatable virtualenv

[P.J. Eby]

At 09:35 AM 3/17/2010 +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
>Carl Meyer wrote:
>>Chris Withers wrote:
>>>Okay, but I think you said at pycon that pip won't work with binary or
>>>.egg distributions?
>>True; IIUC the plan is to eventually support some form of binary package
>>for Windows, but currently binary packages are not supported at all.
>
>This is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and not just because of Windows.
>So, say I produce a binary egg for mysqldb, pip's position appears 
>to be that I'm wrong, and I should have to make sure all the build 
>dependencies are present on my whole cluster of identical machines.
>Same goes for lxml, and anything else with complex build dependencies.
>Really, wtf? ;-)

Ian might not be here to say it, but if he were, I imagine he might 
say, "patches welcome".  ;-)

Seriously, though, I've posted samples here more than once of the 
basic code needed to extract an .egg into a pip-style configuration, 
and easy_install has code that will turn windows .exe files into .egg 
files.  Those parts aren't hard at all, relatively speaking.

What somebody would still need to write, are the pip-specific bits to 
wrap all that in an installation process (including finding the 
downloadables in the first place).