Sometimes it might be desirable to do wheel-like installs without actually creating an archive. Instead, a whim (wheel internal manifest) file could communicate the idea of wheel, just a bunch of files in categories, without the zip file.

The format would be no more than a mapping of category names 'purelib', 'platlib', 'headers', 'scripts', 'data', to a list of tuples with the file's path on the disk and its path relative to the category.

{ "category" : [ ('path on disk', 'path relative to category'), ... ] }

The dist-info directory could be segregated into its own category 'metadata' with each target path as "distname-1.0.dist-info/FILE" i.e. its full path relative to the root of a wheel file.

An installer could consume whim directly bypassing zip. A wheel archiver could consume a whim file and produce the archive with correct MANIFEST.