[Distutils] Multi-version import support for wheel files

[Donald Stufft]

On Aug 25, 2013, at 10:00 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As regards Nick's proposal:
> 
> 1. "An option (or options) to pip, telling it to just drop a wheel file (or the unpacked contents of the wheel as a directory) into site-packages instead of installing the distribution directly as the default version." Well, if it's in site-packages, it *is* importable/installed. That's how site-packages works. So I don't understand what "instead of installing" means. But if --target does what you want then go for it. If you want something different then I think it's likely a bad idea, but I'd need details of how it would work to be sure.

As I understand it Nick means to take the .whl unzip it into a folder named foo-whatever….whl and put that folder into site-packages. Basically the exact same structure as happens with .egg folders except with Wheels.

> 
> 2. "Support for the ".whl" filename format and internal layout in pkg_resources". No, very definitely -1. The wheel format is a *distribution* format and pkg_resources is a *runtime* mechanism. Misxing the two is the key mistake (in my mind) that setuptools made, and we do not want to do so again. If you need a multiversion runtime layout for pkg_resources, then let's define it in a PEP, and write installers to put packages into that format if we need to. But let's not just reuse wheel as that format - that was not its intent. If a distribution format better than wheel comes along in the future, we should be able to replace it without needing to break everyone's runtime code because pkg_resources doesn't know wbout it.
> 
> Paul


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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