Comment 25 for bug 254035

Aha, not so fast. We have two separate issues here, and neither one of them is resolved in Ubuntu:

1: python-nevow in Hardy puts the .egg-info file in the wrong place, and additionally setuptools fails to recognize that it is already installed, so 'easy_install' will redownload it. The most recent debian/sid packaging switched python-nevow to use pycentral (instead of pysupport), which puts the .egg-info file in the right place. Setuptools now does the right thing on sid. So one problem is that Hardy does not have this change from sid. This is a backporting issue.

2: python-simplejson has the same problem (setuptools fails to recognize that it is already installed, and redownloads it) on both sid and hardy. In this case, the .egg-info directory *is* on sys.path, so PJE's explanation seems to not be applicable. simplejson is packaged with python-support.

For simplejson, I did some experiments, to isolate which difference between the two packages was
causing the problem:

 * replacing the .egg-info/ directory with an .egg-info file didn't help
 * moving the .egg-info/ directory from /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/ to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ *does* help

My hypothesis is that the /var/lib directory is added to sys.path fairly late, perhaps by some site.py or *.pth file, and that setuptools is not looking in these directories properly.

So I think that there is still a problem with setuptools, possibly related to python-support.