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

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> skribis:

> I stumbled upon a similar problem when building other Python packages.
> For ‘python-patsy’, for example, I found that an egg archive is produced
> no matter what I put in ‘setup.cfg’.  As far as I can tell, “zip_ok”
> defaults to “0” in recent versions of setuptools, so I don’t think the
> fix you used on ‘python-pillow’ would have much effect in general.

OK.

> 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?

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

Ludo’.