Introduction

Namespace packages offer the huge benefit of being able to distribute parts of a large system in small, self-contained pieces. However, they can be somewhat clunky to navigate, since you end up with a large list of eggs in your egg cache, and then a seemingly endless series of directories you need to open to actually find the contents of your egg.

This recipe sets up a directory structure that mirrors the actual python namespaces, with symlinks to the egg contents. So, instead of this...:

egg-cache/
    my.egg.one-1.0-py2.7.egg/
        my/
            egg/
                one/
                    (contents of first egg)
    my.egg.two-1.0-py2.7.egg/
        my/
            egg/
                two/
                    (contents of second egg)

...you get this:

omelette/
    my/
        egg/
            one/
                (contents of first egg)
            two/
                (contents of second egg)

You can also include non-eggified python packages in the omelette. This makes it simple to get a single path that you can add to your PYTHONPATH for use with specialized python environments like when running under mod_wsgi or PyDev.

Typical usage with Zope and Plone

For a typical Plone buildout, with a part named instance that uses the plone.recipe.zope2instance recipe, the following additions to buildout.cfg will result in an omelette including all eggs used by the Zope instance:

[buildout]
parts =
    ...(other parts)...
    omelette

...

[omelette]
recipe = collective.recipe.omelette
eggs = ${instance:eggs}

Supported options

The recipe supports the following options:

eggs

List of eggs which should be included in the omelette.

location

(optional) Override the directory in which the omelette is created (default is parts/[name of buildout part])

ignore-develop

(optional) Ignore eggs that you are currently developing (listed in ${buildout:develop}). Default is False

ignores

(optional) List of eggs to ignore when preparing your omelette.

packages

List of Python packages whose contents should be included in the omelette. Each line should be in the format [packages_location] [target_directory], where packages_location is the real location of the packages, and target_directory is the (relative) location where the package should be inserted into the omelette (defaults to Products/). Example: packages = ${buildout:directory}/lib/python3.13/site-packages ./

products

(optional) List of old Zope 2-style products directories whose contents should be included in the omelette, one per line. (For backwards-compatibility -- equivalent to using packages with Products as the target directory.)

Using omelette with zipped eggs

Omelette doesn't currently know how to deal with eggs that are zipped. If it encounters one, you'll see a warning something like the following:

omelette: Warning: (While processing egg elementtree) Egg contents not found at
/Users/davidg/.buildout/eggs/elementtree-1.2.7_20070827_preview-py2.4.egg/elementtree.  Skipping.

You can tell buildout to unzip all eggs by setting the unzip = true flag in the [buildout] section. (Note that this will only take effect for eggs downloaded after the flag is set.)

Running the tests

Just grab the recipe from git and run:

tox -p auto

Known issue: The tests run buildout in a separate process, so it's currently impossible to put a pdb breakpoint in the recipe and debug during the test. If you need to do this, set up another buildout which installs an omelette part and includes collective.recipe.omelette as a development egg.

Reporting bugs or asking questions

There is a bugtracker on gitHub: https://github.com/collective/collective.recipe.omelette/issues