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 !