I’ve finished renaming pyinstall to its new name: pip. The name pip is a acronym and declaration: pip installs packages.

I’ve also added a small feature intended for Google App Engine users, allowing you to zip and unzip packages in an environment. For instance:

$ pip zip --list
In ./lib/python2.5/site-packages:
  No zipped packages.
  Unzipped packages:
    paste  (98 files)
    pygments  (64 files)
    tempita  (7 files)
    weberror  (31 files)
    webob  (22 files)
    webtest  (9 files)
    nose  (43 files)
    setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg  (43 files)
    simplejson  (28 files)
$ pip zip webob
Zip webob (in ./lib/python2.5/site-packages/webob)

Right now this doesn’t work well with egg directories (i.e., packages installed with easy_install), though that shouldn’t be too hard to resolve. pip install itself does not install packages into egg directories (it does install eggs, which is to say it installs all the egg metadata and works fine with pkg_resources).

I don’t really use buildout myself, but I would like to throw it out there that I think someone should create a pip recipe as an alternative to zc.recipe.egg. There’s not really a stable programmatic API in pip at this point, but with no consumers of the API it feels like premature design to settle on something now — integrate with pip and we can figure out what that stable API should be. If you integrate buildout, probably another useful feature would be an option have to pip freeze write the packages out to a setting in your buildout.cfg.