sdist

About the only reason I can think of to distribute a python package as an egg is so that you can not include the .py files with your package (and only include .pyc files, which is a dubious way to protect your code anyway). Aside from that, I can't really think of any reason to upload a package as an egg rather than an sdist. In fact, pip doesn't even support eggs. Is there any real reason to use an egg rather than an sdist? One reason: eggs can include compiled C extension modules so that the end user does not need to have the necessary build tools and possible additional headers and

I am a bit confused. There seem to be two different kind of Python packages, source distributions (setup.py sdist) and egg distributions (setup.py bdist_egg). Both seem to be just archives with the same data, the python source files. One difference is that pip , the most recommended package manager, is not able to install eggs. What is the difference between the two and what is 'the' way to do distribute my packages? (Note, I am not wanting to distribute my packages through PyPI, but I want to use a package manager that fetches my dependencies from PyPI) setup.py sdist creates a source