[OE-core] Python egg-info/pth

[Andreas Oberritter]

Hi,

many python packages install egg-info files or directories and/or pth
files inside the site-packages directory.

AFAICT, egg-info is used to provide multiple versions of python
site packages, if required, if no package manager like opkg is
involved. Since this is not the case in OE, it only serves as a way
for python programs to depend on specific versions of a python site
package. This doesn't make much sense, because package version
dependencies should already be handled by opkg (or rpm or deb).

So I'd like to understand whether it's useful to ship them at all or
to package them separately. For example, python-twisted installs the
following files:

WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/top_level.txt
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/requires.txt
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/SOURCES.txt
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/PKG-INFO
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
WARNING:   /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Twisted-12.0.0-py2.7.egg-info/not-zip-safe

Twisted gets split into many sub-packages and an empty meta package.
If the egg-info gets packaged into the meta package, it wouldn't be
available if someone just installed twisted-web, for example.

Long story short: I don't see how egg-info can be useful in OE. How
about removing egg-info in setuptools.bbclass or moving it to ${PN}-metadata
for all python packages?

How about pth files? Are they meaningful in an OE environment?

Regards,
Andreas