When I run pip freeze I see (among other expected packages) pkg-resources==0.0.0. I have seen a few posts mentioning this package (including this one), but none explaining what it is, or why it is included in the output of pip freeze. The main reason I am wondering is out of curiosity, but also, it seems to break things in some cases when trying to install packages with a requirements.txt file generated with pip freeze that includes the pkg-resources==0.0.0 line (for example when Travis CI tries to install dependencies through pip and finds this line).

What is pkg-resources, and is it OK to remove this line from requirements.txt?

Update:

I have found that this line only seems to exist in the output of pip freeze when I am in a virtualenv. I am still not sure what it is or what it does, but I will investigate further knowing that it is likely related to virtualenv.