[Distutils] Multi-version import support for wheel files

[Paul Moore]

On 25 August 2013 15:02, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> 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.
>

OK, I get that. But I want to avoid referring to it as "wheel format"
because that's what eggs did, having 3 distinct formats, all used for
subtly different things and it meant that people had a confused view of
"what an egg was". I'd rather not promote the same confusion for wheels.

Thanks for the various comments that have been made. I think I'm clear
where I stand now - I have no objection to the idea of the proposal, but
(1) I'd rather the on-disk format was clearly distinguished from wheels as
it's a runtime format rather than a distribution format, (2) I don't really
want to add an option to pip to install in this format, but if we do it
should work for sdists as well as wheels (notwithstanding any longer-term
goal to deprecate installing from sdists) and (3) I don't want to see
adding wheel files to sys.path as ever becoming a mainstream way of working
(that's what "pkg_resources supports the whl format" means to me - which is
why I want to see the unpacked format referred to as something other than
"wheel").

Paul
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