egg-info directory name lacks Python version string

[Chris Lasher]

For some reason, the version of distribute that ships under the python-setuptools package for Lucid and Maverick creates egg-info directories that lack the Python version string (on Lucid and Maverick, this identifier would be "py2.6"). For example, when installing the Python package yolk version 0.4.1, the egg-info directory created is named "yolk-0.4.1.egg-info" instead of "yolk-0.4.1-py2.6.egg-info". This has created issues with pip; see issue 104:

https://bitbucket.org/ianb/pip/issue/104/pip-uninstall-on-ubuntu-linux

I am trying to understand why the behavior of the version of distribute that ships in the python-setuptools package is inconsistent with the upstream behavior of distribute.

More specifically, I am concerned there may have been Debian/Ubuntu-specific patches applied that have affected the behavior of egg-info directory naming during creation to be simply "PKGNAME-VERSION.egg-info", but that someone also forgot to apply a patch to the method pkg_resources.Distribution.egg_name(), which still provides the "PKGNAME-VERSION-py2.6.egg-info", which is the expected behavior.

[Carl Meyer (carljm)]

Pip uninstall calls the Distribution.egg_name() method, and appends ".egg-info", to determine where to find package metadata. This is precisely the same technique used by setuptools/distribute's install_egg_info command to determine the name of the metadata directory when creating it (see https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/src/f64c2d57df43/setuptools/command/install_egg_info.py). So somehow Ubuntu's packaged version of distribute (python-setuptools) is breaking this symmetry: metadata is installed under an egg-info dir lacking pyversion, but when pip calls the Distribution.egg_name() method it gets a name back that includes pyversion.

This breaks pip uninstall for all users of Ubuntu's python-setuptools package. As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with what pip is doing here; the breakage is in Ubuntu's package.

[Syn (synasius)]

Hello everyone, I'm affected by this bug on ubuntu 10.10

I was looking at the sources for the python-setuptools package and I found something interesting:
if you take a look at the diff file included you can see that setuptools/command/install_egg_info.py has been modified
adding the following code to the finalize_options method:

+ if self.install_layout:
+ if not self.install_layout.lower() in ['deb']:
+ raise DistutilsOptionError(
+ "unknown value for --install-layout")
+ basename = basename.replace('-py%s' % pkg_resources.PY_MAJOR, '')
+ elif self.prefix_option or 'real_prefix' in sys.__dict__:
+ # don't modify for virtualenv
+ pass
+ else:
+ basename = basename.replace('-py%s' % pkg_resources.PY_MAJOR, '')

The version string is always replaced, except when you are in a virtualenv (explore site-packages in your virtualenv).
During the uninstall process this kind of replacing is not made in any way, of course.

I'm a little bit confused... anyway, I hope this can help to solve the problem!

[Carl Meyer (carljm)]

This is an issue in the upstream Debian python-setuptools package. I've discussed it with the Debian maintainer for python-setuptools and filed a bug here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=618367