It seems that doing a little bit of teasing on the next release generates valuable feedback. So I’ll do more 
In the next version we have this really useful module called depgraph (full doc). It creates a dependency graph to study installed distribution, but also to-be-installed distributions. This is the basis of any installer script but is also useful for users who want to know what’s installed.
Setuptools has a module called pkg_resources that would allow to create such a feature, but distutils2 used an enhanced version of the stdlib module pkgutil which now supports PEP 376 but also offers a compatibility mode to be able to browse packages that were installed by pre-PEP 376 installers like Pip or easy_install. The new pkgutil module lives in a _backport package in distutils2 but will be pushed back to the stdlib as soon as we reach a stable version for distutils2. It will make pkg_resources obsolete for the part that let you iterate on installed projects and will provide more. (Note that pkg_resources contains much more features besides.)
But enough talking, try to build your depgraph yourself ! depgraph can be called as a script to generate dependency graphs in the stdout, or as .dot (graphviz) files.
Here’s a small demo:
# installing the latest tip $ sudo easy_install http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutils2/get/bdfaec90d665.gz Downloading http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutils2/get/bdfaec90d665.gz Processing bdfaec90d665.gz ... # what do we have installed ? $ python -m distutils2.depgraph Dependency graph: PasteDeploy 1.3.3 virtualenv 1.4.9 pyflakes 0.4.0 ... Distutils2 1.0a3 ropemode 0.1-rc2 rope 0.9.3 [rope (>= 0.9.2)] ... # let's create a dot file of the dependencies # if a distribution don't have a dependency it's not added - so you don't get crazy graphs $ python -m distutils2.depgraph -d Dot file written at "depgraph.dot" # let's create an image $ dot -Tpng depgraph.dot > depgraph.png
Try it out and let us know how it worked for you !
