[Distutils] How to handle launcher script importability?

[Paul Moore]

On 21 August 2013 07:36, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:
>
> > Mounting Wheels seems like a bad idea, it was one of the things Daniel
> > explicitly removed (since Wheels are basically cleaned up eggs). Adding
> > it back in ex post facto seems like it's an idea that's going down the
> wrong
> > track.
>
> Like I said, the sky will fall. Isn't importing from zips what's being
> discussed in this part of the thread?
>
> Unless something is expressly verboten, I can't see a reason why particular
> implementations of a PEP can't provide additional functionality, as long as
> they implement the contents of the standard. And in Python's
> consenting-adults world, I can't recall seeing any such express
> proscriptions.
>

I'm concerned that you need extra metadata (not described in the wheel
spec) to do this. It means that there are in effect two subtly different
types of wheel. To be specific, if I create a wheel for (say) pyzmq using
distil, and mount it, everything works. But if I create the same wheel with
bdist_wheel or pip, it doesn't. That, to my mind, is very bad as it damages
the credibility of wheel as a standardised format.

Can I suggest that if you need to add features like this, you need to get
the wheel spec updated to mandate them, so that *all* wheels will follow
the same spec.

Essentially, I am -1 on any feature that uses information that is not
documented in the wheel spec. Pip in particular resisted adding support for
wheels until they were standardised in a PEP. It's frustrating if that PEP
*still* doesn't mean that the wheel format is the same for all tools. (Note
that another area where this is an issue is script wrappers, as the spec is
silent about the fact that they are specified using entry-points.txt in
metadata 1.x/setuptools. I've sent a proposed update to the spec to Daniel
for his consideration).

Paul

PS Variances like this make me want to go back to the original idea that
wheel support functions should be implemented in the stdlib, rather than
having competing implementations "in the wild". Or at least, that one
implementation should be considered the reference implementation that all
others need to be compatible with :-(
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130821/12046f5d/attachment.html>