[Distutils] distlib updated to include "entry point" functionality

[PJ Eby]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 7:28 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I don't believe that wheels are meant to be directly importable, but I could
> be wrong about that. I am not sure why callee dependencies need to be
> transparently met by distributions not on sys.path; Broadly speaking, and
> leaving eggs out of the picture, I would expect a distribution to declare its
> dependencies, and for these to be installed in the appropriate site-packages
> by the installer.

Except that installation doesn't always equal placement on a sys.path.
 Application platforms can and do distinguish between a plugin that is
"installed" and one that is "activated" or "enabled".

Again, the entire egg infrastructure was originally designed to
support pluggable applications, which is part of why it's so annoying
to Linux packagers at times.  (In roughly the same way as Firefox is
annoying to them for having .xpi's.)

I'm not saying distlib must support all these plugin usecases
*itself*, but if it solves its chosen usecases in a way that can't be
*adapted by others* to handle the app platform use cases, then there's
not going to be an appealing alternative to sticking with
pkg_resources or its derivatives.


> I assume from the context above that that you actually mean "no" as the
> answer to the question "is it insufficient?", whereas I would take "probably
> so" to mean "yes, it's insufficient".

Oops - I misread that as "Do you feel that this is sufficient?".  Sorry.