At 06:11 PM 3/23/2009 -0700, Kevin Teague wrote:
I have some confusion over the name .egg-info. From what I understand,
Eggs are a packaging format that contain metadata. But if you take a
Distutils installed package and put a .egg-info file or directory
beside it, that doesn't make the package an Egg, does it?
Yes, actually, it does. See
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats for details.
To add to this confusion, I always associate the Egg format with the
additional metadata fields provided by setuptools. So when I see
.egg- info I always expect that the PKG-INFO will contain an
'install_requires' field, etc.
That information is maintained separately, as there's more tracked by
setuptools than distutils and the formats are not compatible. Also,
PKG-INFO is generic for a project as a whole, whereas the
egg-specific dependency info can vary by python version and/or platform.
I guess that PEP would entail a little more work than just managing a
set of fields since PyPI would also need to be updated to display
those fields. But it would be really lovely to be able to see the
'install_requires' field when browsing PyPI - and click on links in
that field to take you to those pakcages PyPI pages. And as an added
bonus if the 'namespace_packages' field was clickable such that the
link took you to a list of all packages which participated in that
namespace, that'd be pretty sweet!
The formats of this information are documented in EggFormats, and
it's certainly possible for the PyPI software to pull the data from
the sdist and/or egg files. But someone would have to supply the
patches to implement this.
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