Bob Tanner wrote:
An egg and Python packages don't map 1-to-1. An egg can contain multiple packages (which is fairly uncommon so far), but also a top-level package can exist in more than one egg (i.e., namespace packages, like zope.interfaces or paste.script). The metadata belongs to the egg, not to the package inside the egg.I'd like to bring focus back to immediate problem at hand (and yes, I understand there is something much bigger involved). The ultimate goal is to debianize TurboGears, reading the above, and other posts using the legacy site-packages (non-egg) installation will "break" TurboGears?
Well... not really, but TurboGears will think it is broken, because it will require packages that will be available (through some non-egg form), but it won't realize are available. ElementTree in particular; I don't know if the other packages TG uses are available as Debian packages currently. That's for 0.8. In 0.9 and ahead it will be more broken, because TG will both provide and consume egg metadata (entry_points, in particular). So while it would be reasonably easy to patch TurboGears now to be installed without eggs, that's only a short-term solution.
However, it is also possible that you could patch Kid (which TG requires) to remove the requirement on ElementTree (adding that requirement to the Debian package metadata) and then you'd be fine into the future. In that model, all the new packages you do for TurboGears would be installed as eggs, but packages already available won't be installed as eggs.
-- Ian Bicking / ianb@colorstudy.com / http://blog.ianbicking.org