Missing files from eggs

published Jan 30, 2008, last modified Jan 31, 2008

That egg you just build might be missing some files. Check that egg! Update: I received some pointers for more info.

Today I discovered that an egg I just made for a package was missing some files. Most noticeable was the missing of some zcml files.

It turns out that when you do an svn export and then a python2.4 setup.py bdist_egg to create your egg, you are missing some files. At least I was. When you do an svn checkout and then make your egg, all files are there.

In neither case was any zcml file mentioned in the SOURCES.txt file in the automatically created egg-info directory.

For the tar ball created by a python2.4 setup.py sdist I did not notice any difference.

Does anyone know what is going on here and how to solve this so it works from an svn export too?

Cooking lesson for today: check that egg!

Oh, and sorry for spamming http://planet.plone.org today. I changed the language of a lot of weblog entries from neutral into English. Now they all needlessly show up on that home page.

Update

Daniel Nouri pointed me to the setuptools docs that explain what is going on; plus the docs for disutils, especially the part about adding a manifest file. And Andreas Zeidler pointed to a thread on the Plone developers list. And Florian Schulze pointed me to both. :-) I have the feeling there are a few people reading this weblog. :-) Thanks everyone!

In my case the tar ball problems pointed out by Florian did not affect me. In fact, when I uploaded just the tar ball and tried to easy_install it, this went fine: an egg was automatically created from the tar ball. But it is good to know that there can be problems in that area too.

Conclusion for me: easiest is just to create and upload an egg from a subversion checkout, not from an export. And if you want more control, read those setuptools docs.

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