At 09:50 PM 11/28/2008 -0800, Brian Cameron wrote:
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.
Please feel free to suggest specific additions, especially in the
form of a patch. ;-)
If you're looking for documentation of the internal format of eggs, please see:
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats
Which describes the contents of .egg-info directories.
I'm making the assumption, by the way, that my response was clear as
to why you should not remove the .egg-info directories; even if you
can get away with it for some specific subset of packages and/or
installation circumstances, you will be bitten eventually when your
set of packages expands or a package begins using the other features
at a later date, etc. This has already happened to at least one
Linux distribution that I'm aware of; they had been stripping out the
.egg-info and it then caused more problems for their users than it
was worth. (There really wasn't any benefit to stripping them out,
actually, since the space usage is minimal compared to the size of
the code in a typical package, especially for the distutils-generated
.egg-info which is only one short file per package.)
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