It would probably be a lot easier to improve the platform string generation and comparison logic, as has been done for OS X.
As PJE has mentioned, the intent is that the egg name should contain enough information to decide if that egg will work on your platform. For example, if it says "py2.5-win32" then you know it will work on your Python 2.5 on 32-bit Windows, and if it says "py2.5-macosx-10.3- ppc" then you know it will work on your PowerPC-based Mac with Python 2.5. This can be used for example by easy_install to get a directory listing of eggs and choose which one will work on the local platform based solely on its filename.
As PJE mentioned, it would be nice if this same technique worked on Linux.
However, it currently doesn't. Eggs built on Linux are named something like py2.5-Linux-x86_64. To know whether such an egg would actually work on your Linux system, you would also need to know whether the Python was compiled with UCS-2 or UCS-4 internal unicode representation, as well as what version of glibc you have. Is there anything else that would need to be added into the egg name?
Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
