Danek: The egg format and information about its use of metadata is documented in the setuptools manual in the following places:
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EggFormats http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#adding-new-egg-info-files http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#defining-additional-metadata > I posed a question with the upstream maintainers to ask them about the > purpose of the egg files and whether they need to be installed. Refer > here: > > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2008-November/010556.html In my discussions with the setuptools community, they indicate that these files are not turds, but metadata which setuptools makes use of when the user might install other modules. setuptools uses this metadata to figure out things like dependencies. They highlight that some distros have, in the past, removed them and this caused problems for them later on. If you don't want to read the whole thread, the following two emails are probably most interesting: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2008-November/010561.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2008-November/010562.html So, I think we should safely recommend that modules which ship egg files should not remove them. > I am extending the timeout to next Tuesday 12/02, in the hopes that I get > an answer from the upstream community so we can make sure we are doing the > right thing and installing the correct files. So, Danek, does this address your concerns? If so, I think I will go ahead and mark the case approved since this is the only outstanding issue. Thanks, Brian
