How do you uninstall a python package that was installed using distutils?

Question

Can you simply delete the directory from your python installation, or are there any lingering files that you must delete?

Answer 1

It varies based on the options that you pass to install and the contents of the distutils configuration files on the system/in the package. I don't believe that any files are modified outside of directories specified in these ways.

Notably, distutils does not have an uninstall command at this time.

It's also noteworthy that deleting a package/egg can cause dependency issues – utilities like easy_install attempt to alleviate such problems.