pip: Why sometimes installed as egg, sometimes installed as files

Question

Where can you force pip to install as \"flat\" and not as \"egg\".

For me it seems random. Sometimes it gets installed as egg, sometime as flat.

pip help i

Answer 1

I was having this egg-only install problem, and it turned out I had failed to git add the __init__.py in the root of my package. It was driving me crazy that this would work:

pip install .

...but this would fail:

mkdir /tmp/piptest
cd /tmp/piptest
git clone $OLDPWD .
pip install .

It was hard to notice the difference using diff -r . $OLDPWD because there are so many non-committed pyc files and development tool scripts.

This is probably not the answer for this OP, but I hope it helps someone who Googles "pip only installing the egg" as I did.