Re: [Distutils] question re: local development workflow / egg-info / synced directories

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 2:12 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

On 31 March 2016 at 10:00, Ionel Cristian Mărieș wrote:

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On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 9:22 AM, Chris Jerdonek wrote:

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It would be nice if pip-installing a project directory in editable mode didn't require writing to the project directory. Is there a fundamental reason it needs to?

I'd speculate that no one was annoyed enough to fix it.

Editable mode is basically managed by setuptools. So any fix would need to be in setuptools, not pip.

After your two comments, I searched setuptools's tracker and found the following issue ("develop does not support placing the egg outside of the source folder"): https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/361 So it looks like the feature may already be present in setuptools, but just not working correctly (i.e. the feature has a bug). If this feature were working in setuptools, would pip need any changes to "install -e" to allow passing along this extra info to setuptools, or is there already a mechanism to allow pass-through of extra setuptools options? Thanks, --Chris

It's quite possible that the reason editable mode doesn't get much love is that from a user's perspective it seems like a pip issue, but the pip devs see it as a setuptools problem they can't do much about. Not many users have the time or inclination to follow up on a bug report with the downstream project, so things tend to stay as they are.

Paul