On Sep 4, 2014, at 1:58 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:

It's always been obvious that wheel would probably need additional
paths besides the sysconfig ones, and there's been some discussion
here recently.

For the next version we should:

The next version of the Wheel spec?

1. Add the autoconf dirs.
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html.
"packagename-1.0/data/dvidir/" or any of the other autoconf paths
would be valid, in addition to the existing distutils paths. (The
autoconf paths are defined relative to a $prefix, in Python's case
$prefix is usually the base of the virtualenv).

Sounds plausible.

2. Replace WHEEL with wheel.json. wheel.json contains all the
information from WHEEL but is json which is rather popular these days.

wheel.json may contain custom paths with string Template() interpolation.

{ "paths": "name":"$prefix/mypath", "othername":"$bindir/etc",
"thirdname": "$othername/subfolder" }

(the sysconfig names, autoconf names, and custom path names can be
interpolated here)

I don’t understand this paths stuff, what is it supposed to be doing?

Also with JSON, the problem is the current tooling is now setup to

handle a key: value WHEEL store, so we’ll need some sort of a migration

path for old tools to know that this is a Wheel they can’t handle. It’s

possible that it’s not worth it to do this.