<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=iso-8859-1"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div><div>On Jan 28, 2014, at 6:38 PM, Nick Coghlan <<a href="mailto:ncoghlan@gmail.com">ncoghlan@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><p dir="ltr">I think you're reading too much into that comment. Putting a wheel file directly on sys.path is no different from putting any other zipfile directly on sys.path - whether or not it will work depends on the context, but it's a useful capability if used responsibly (as we do in the ensurepip implementation).</p><p dir="ltr">The key problems with eggs in relation to this were:<br>
- easy_install preferring to install as eggs by default<br>
- setuptools install a global site hook that added every installed egg to sys.path for every application run in that Python installation</p><p dir="ltr">Neither of those applies to wheels - pip always unpacks them when installing, and if you want to add one to sys.path you have to do it manually, it doesn't happen automatically.</p><p dir="ltr">All the new note in the PEP is clarifying is that it *isn't* an accident that the wheel format is zipimport compatible for pure Python wheels, we deliberately designed it that way (hence the "Root-is-purelib" setting, rather than requiring separate purelib and platlib subdirectories).</p><p dir="ltr">Cheers,<br>
Nick.</p>
</blockquote></div><br><div><div>Regardless if it was or wasn't an accident, I believe it was a mistake.</div><div>Supporting it officially at all means that we have limitations on what we can</div><div>do to make Wheel a better format. I had hopes that Wheel could be made more</div><div>generic than it currently is, but because of the fact that directly adding</div><div>them to sys.path is supported that makes it much much more awkward to do so.</div></div><div>
<br>-----------------<br>Donald Stufft<br>PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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