Daniel Holth
You have to make a maximum of 3 requests: one for the directory pointer, one for the directory, and one for the file you want. It's not particularly difficult to make an HTTP-backed seekable file object to pass to ZipFile() for this purpose but I don't have an example. Normally the last few k of the file will contain all 3 pieces. 8k or 16k would be a good guess.
I don't need an example for doing it with multiple HTTP requests. I only asked for an example because you said one could read the metadata "with a single HTTP partial request", and I couldn't see how it could always be done with a single request. PEP 427 is mute on the subject of zip file comments in a .whl, but perhaps it shouldn't be. IIUC, the directory of the zip file *could* be further from the end of the file by more than 16K, due to the possible presence of a pathologically large comment in the end record. Regards, Vinay Sajip