make EB installation as zipped eggs work #1369
Description
The major advantage of this is significant speedup when EasyBuild is installed on a shared filesystem.
The major problem with this is that there's no direct access to the Python modules or easyconfig files anymore as files.
Via pkg_resources.resource_string for example, the contents of a specific Python module or data file (like easyconfig files) can be retrieved from a zipped egg, see https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/pkg_resources.html#resourcemanager-api .
It also introduces a dependency on setuptools, since pkg_resources is a part of setuptools.
However, since the performance impact of this is potentially huge (especially for things like --search), this may be worth the trouble...