Phillip:
Thank you and Nathan for the answers. That is very helpful information
to me. I have been reading further and took a look at the
documentation, and notice egg files and metadata are described here:
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#adding-new-egg-info-files
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#defining-additional-metadata
However, I didn't find any references to the situation I am describing,
about how these files are useful to install even when not shipping the
module as eggs. If such documentation exists, I am sure that would help
me further understand how this works. Or might the documentation
benefit from discussing this a bit more? The documentation does not
provide any real examples of what constitutes metadata, or why being
able to store metadata is generally useful.
Thanks again,
Brian
At 11:21 AM 11/27/2008 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:
Is there any value in shipping these files when not delivering as
Eggs, or
could they safely be just removed?
They cannot safely be removed, for several reasons, including:
1. They identify the installed package so that:
a) code which looks for dependencies at runtime will be satisfied, and
b) easy_install won't install a duplicate of the same package when
trying to satisfy a dependency
2. Packages which provide or use entry points will not function
correctly without them
3. Packages which include other metadata or project-specific data (such
as localizations, translations, etc.) for runtime use will not work
correctly either.
Thus, neither setuptools nor the distutils provide the option of not
including .egg-info.
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