bug#20765: Python .egg files must not be compressed

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

>> I could only coerce the build system to install plain files by adding a
>> build phase like this:
>>
>>          (add-after 'unpack 'prevent-generation-of-egg-archive
>>           (lambda _
>>             (substitute* "setup.py"
>>               (("from setuptools import setup")
>>                "from distutils.core import setup"))
>>             #t))
>>
>> It turns out that when ‘setuptools.setup’ is used egg archives are
>> built, when ‘distutils.core.setup’ is used, however, this does not
>> happen.
>
> But are distutils.core and setuptools the same thing?  Replacing one by
> the other sounds a bit scary, no?

I’m not familiar with Python packaging.  From what I understand,
distutils has much fewer features than setuptools; but in the few cases
that I tried replacing it did work out just fine.

> Still it would be nice to have a generic solution.  Maybe we should
> patch setuptools itself to change its defaults?

This would probably be best, but I don’t understand setuptools enough to
propose a patch.

~~ Ricardo