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In the current packaging module, the PEP 376 .dist-info directory is generated at install time. It should be split into two phases, build_distinfo and install_distinfo, to support at least two use cases:
- the develop command, which needs access to .dist-info
- the resources API (packaging.database.get_file), which is intended to work from an uninstalled codebase too.
The normal directory to put the generated files would be the build directory; however, setuptools’ egg_info command generates the file in the same directory as the setup.py file. I’d prefer we avoid it in packaging, for consistency with other build_* commands, and to avoid that every project has to put "*.dist-info" in their VCS ignore file, but I don’t know if there is a technical reason that constrains setuptools to do so.