Robert Collins <robertc <at> robertcollins.net> writes:
This is fairly broken - it doesn't handle platlib vs purelib (see pip PR 3450), doesn't handle data files, or any other layout. Donald says pip uses it to maintain the _vendor subtrees only, which doesn't seem like a particularly strong use case.
Certainly the help description for it is misleading - since what we're actually doing is copying only a subset of what the package installed
- so at a minimum we need to be much clearer about what it does.
But, I think it would be better to deprecate it and remove it... so I'm pinging here to see if anyone can explain a sensible use case for it in the context of pip :)
I use it in pretty much the same way as Paul mentioned - I wouldn't like it to go unless something equivalent is available. Updating the help / documentation for it to better reflect what it does would be uncontroversial for me, but I see no strong reason for deprecation and removal. As Paul suggests, it can get stricter about what it'll handle.
Regards,
Vinay Sajip