Harry: For some Free Software Python packages that I publish [1, 2, 3], I've been trying to gain the benefits of eggs while also making the resulting packages transparently useful to folks like you.
(You can follow along here: [4].) One thing I've accomplished is figuring out how to install a Python package whether it is distutils or setuptools while maintaining my preferences for "use GNU stow" and "don't run setup code as root": [5]. The next thing that I'm working on is bundling dependencies in source tarball form with libraries, so that when you execute setup.py it installs the dependency from the bundled tarball and does not attempt to reach the Net. So, please keep us informed about this issue. There are many benefits of setuptools, and there are great benefits of compatibility and standardization, and I'm hoping that we can make setuptools be more compatible with other paradigms instead of getting into a "everybody please use it / no everybody please don't use it" tug-of-war. Regards, Zooko [1] http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/zfec [2] http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pyutil [3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe [4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/15 [5] http://zooko.com/log-2007.html#d2007-06-02-distutils_or_setuptools_with_GNU_stow -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
