It varies based on the options that you pass to install and the contents of the distutils configuration files on the system/in the package. I don't believe that any files are modified outside of directories specified in these ways.
If this is for testing and/or development purposes, setuptools has a develop command that updates every time you make a change (so you don't have to uninstall and reinstall every time you make a change). And you can uninstall the package using this command as well.
If you do use this, anything that you declare as a script will be left behind as a lingering file.
The three things that get installed that you will need to delete are:
Packages/modules
Scripts
Data files
Now on my linux system these live in:
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
/usr/bin
/usr/share
But on a windows system they are more likely to be entirely within the Python distribution directory. I have no idea about OSX except it is more likey to follow the linux pattern.
Yes, it is safe to simply delete anything that distutils installed. That goes for installed folders or .egg files. Naturally anything that depends on that code will no longer work.
If you want to make it work again, simply re-install.
By the way, if you are using distutils also consider using the multi-version feature. It allows you to have multiple versions of any single package installed. That means you do not need to delete an old version of a package if you simply want to install a newer version.
I just uninstalled a python package, and even though I'm not certain I did so perfectly, I'm reasonably confident.
I started by getting a list of all python-related files, ordered by date, on the assumption that all of the files in my package will have more or less the same timestamp, and no other files will.
Luckily, I've got python installed under /opt/Python-2.6.1; if I had been using the Python that comes with my Linux distro, I'd have had to scour all of /usr, which would have taken a long time.
Then I just examined that list, and noted with relief that all the stuff that I wanted to nuke consisted of one directory, /opt/Python-2.6.1/lib/python2.6/site-packages/module-name/, and one file, /opt/Python-2.6.1/lib/python2.6/site-packages/module-x.x.x_blah-py2.6.egg-info.
ERROR: flake8 3.7.9 has requirement pycodestyle<2.6.0,>=2.5.0, but you'll have pycodestyle 2.3.1 which is incompatible.
ERROR: nuscenes-devkit 1.0.8 has requirement motmetrics<=1.1.3, but you'll have motmetrics 1.2.0 which is incompatible.
Installing collected packages: descartes, future, torch, cachetools, torchvision, flake8-import-order, xmltodict, entrypoints, flake8, motmetrics, nuscenes-devkit
Attempting uninstall: torch
Found existing installation: torch 1.0.0
Uninstalling torch-1.0.0:
Successfully uninstalled torch-1.0.0
Attempting uninstall: torchvision
Found existing installation: torchvision 0.2.1
Uninstalling torchvision-0.2.1:
Successfully uninstalled torchvision-0.2.1
Attempting uninstall: entrypoints
Found existing installation: entrypoints 0.2.3
ERROR: Cannot uninstall 'entrypoints'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.