The "easy_install" program is intended for end users to install packages. Since it is not a development tool, I believe it should be in the python-setuptools package rather than the python-setuptools-devel package.
The reason why it's in a separate -devel subpackage is because it requires python-devel. Please see #251645 and #240707 for more info.
I've been thinking about this more, and I really think that there are missing dependencies here. The python-setuptools-devel package has two files: 1) /usr/bin/easy_install: a 9 line script that imports and runs pkg_resources.load_entry_point 2) /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/easy_install.py: a 5 line script that loads and runs setuptools.command.easy_install.main The actual dependency on python-devel happens in the distutils libraries (which is part of the Python package), not in these trivial scripts, so the python-setuptools package should be able to depend on python package instead of python-devel. It really looks like they did the wrong thing in bug #251645. This will need to be fixed in the python package before it can be fixed in setuptools, so I've created bug #531901 for python.
Sure. Once bug #531901 is resolved, I'll be happy to change the python-setuptools package. I think we want to pull everything back into a single package with a Provides: python-setuptools = %{version} Does that sound good to you?
Now that dmalcolm has fixed bug #531901 in python-2.6.4-2.fc13, it should be possible to combine python-setuptools-devel into python-setuptools (for fc13, anyway).
Done: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1786594