I noticed yesterday that Nick made a commit to PEP427 that Wheels were designed to be compatible with zipimport so that you could directly add them to sys.path (http://hg.python.org/peps/rev/811e34eda04c). I was not aware that this was the case, and had thought otherwise, and have been telling people that although Wheels could technically be used that way that doing so was considered unsupported. I think we need to reconsider this. I cannot stress how badly an idea I think it is for Wheels to concern itself with the ability to add the Wheel to sys.path and import it. One of the major problems with Egg was that it confused the difference between a distribution format and a runtime installation format. I believe that if we have this as a supported option, that ultimately it will lead towards the same kind of problems that Egg had trying to fulfill two roles at once. Further more it won't even work accurately for all Wheels (as Nick's edit says) so we require that people wanting to do this figure out if their Wheel can or can not be added to the sys.path (which isn't as simple as looking at the tags because a platform specific Wheel may only contain optional C modules). If a single file importable item for a project is something that end users want, then an additional format should be developed that does not concern itself with the ability to unpack and install the project and instead solves the problems that come with trying to stick arbitrary things in a zipped file and import them. So yea, I think that the goals of an importable format and an distribution format are not completely overlapped, and if Wheel tries to be both, then both sides of that will suffer with a less useful and less suitable ----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA