On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 3:16 PM, Donald Stufft
The outcome of all of these types of installs are subtly different and we’ve had a number of users regularly get confused when they act differently over the years. I do not think it’s possible to make (5) act like anything else because it is inherently different, however I think we can get to the point that 1-4 all act the exact same way. and I think the way to do it is to change these so instead it is like:
1. I have a wheel and pip installs it. 2. I have an sdist and pip turns it into a wheel and then pip installs it. 3. I have a directory and pip turns it into a sdist and then pip turns that sdist into a wheel and then pip installs it. 4. I have a directory and pip installs it in editable mode.
I wrote some more detailed comments on this idea in the reply I just posted to Paul's message, but briefly, the alternative way to approach this would be: 1. I have a wheel and pip installs it 2. I have an sdist and pip unpacks it into a directory and builds a wheel from that directory and then pip installs it. 3. I have a directory and pip builds a wheel from that directory and then pip installs it. 4. I have a directory and pip installs it in editable mode. This is actually simpler, because we've eliminated the "create an sdist" operation and replaced it with the far-more-trivial "unpack an sdist". And it isn't even a replacement, because your 2 and my 2 are actually identical when you look at what it means to turn an sdist into a wheel :-). -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org