The .egg-info files which are produced by distutils in Python >= 2.5 are
the only standard, cross-platform way for a Python package
("distribution") to declare its name and version number in a
machine-parseable way.  Unfortunately, these files are named ".egg-info"
even when the Python package in question was produced by distutils
without setuptools, was never packaged as an egg, and is not installed
as an egg.  It has nothing to do with "egg".  The fact that the file has
"egg" in its name causes most people to think that it has something to
do with eggs, which leads to all sorts of problems including people
removing the file and thus deleting the machine-parseable metadata about
the Python package's name and version number.

This ticket is a request that distutils start calling this file
".pkg-info" instead.  Obviously we can't just stop including them under
the name ".egg-info" since that would break existing usage, but we could
start producing files under the name ".pkg-info", and make ".egg-info"
be a symlink or a copy of ".pkg-info" for backwards compatibility.  Also
of course we can update the documentation (if there is any) of what the
.pkg-info file is.  Since the current problems are mostly problems of
communication and documentation, this simple change to the name of the
file might go a long way to improving things.

Please have a look at PEP 376 we are buildin instead

http://svn.python.org/projects/peps/trunk/pep-0376.txt

and commentin distutils-ML

Thank you.  I've now read PEP 376.  It is good.  However, this same
issue remains in PEP 376 like it does in today's distutils.  If the new
work in PEP 376 is going to continue to use the word "egg" in its
filenames, then we need to send out an announcement of some sort to say
"HEY!  Pay attention!  This is actually a supported part of the core of
Python even though it has the word 'egg' in it.".  I suppose including a
sentence to that effect in the distutils release announcements and in
the "What's new in Python" document will suffice.

By the way, here is the ticket on allmydata.org "Tahoe" where this issue 
was bugging me which is why I opened this ticket:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/149 # unable to use pre-installed 
non-setuptools^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdistutils-aware nevow