PUBLIC MARKS with tags package & dev

Easy Install is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages.

Packages are a great convenience for gurus and new users alike. Thus, users may be less inclined to use software that is not packaged. This is unfortunate for GNU/Linux software developers since packaging software is a huge pain, especially given the huge variety of packaging formats.

"Eggs are to Pythons as Jars are to Java..." Python Eggs are zipfiles using the .egg extension, that support including data and C extensions as well as Python code. They can be used with Python 2.3 and up, and can be built using the setuptools package (see the Python CVS sandbox for source code, or the EasyInstall page for current installation instructions). Once the implementation is far enough along, we plan to propose it for inclusion with the standard library beginning in Python 2.5. The primary benefits of Python Eggs are: * They enable tools like the "Easy Install" Python package manager (NEW!) * They are a "zero installation" format for a Python package; no build or install step is required, just put them on PYTHONPATH or sys.path and use them * They can include package metadata, such as the other eggs they depend on * They allow "namespace packages" (packages that just contain other packages) to be split into separate distributions (e.g. zope.*, twisted.*, peak.* packages can be distributed as separate eggs, unlike normal packages which must always be placed under the same parent directory. This allows what are now huge monolithic packages to be distributed as separate components.) * They allow applications or libraries to specify the needed version of a library, so that you can e.g. require("Twisted-Internet>=2.0") before doing an import twisted.internet. There are also other benefits that may come from having a standardized format, similar to the benefits of Java's "jar" format.