[Distutils] Multi-version import support for wheel files

[PJ Eby]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 3:06 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The clumsiness of the __main__.__requires__ workaround aside, the main
>> advantage this offers is that it *should* result in a relatively
>> straightforward addition to pkg_resources to make it work with wheel
>> files as well as eggs. That's important, because anyone that is
>> currently doing side-by-side multi-versioning in Python is using the
>> pkg_resources API to do it, since that's the only option currently
>> available.
>
> No. It isn't. Buildout doesn't use pks_resources to do it.
> (Buildout used pkg_resources at build time to manage package meta
> data, but I think that's orthogonal to what you're talking about.)
>
> I'd also hazard to guess that most of the folks with multi-version
> installs are using buildout to do it, as buildout does have a
> fair number of users.

FWIW, I would also note that if you use easy_install to install
anything, you are quite possibly using multi-version installs without
realizing it.  (The __main__.__requires__ API is used in
easy_install-generated script wrappers, so there isn't any way you'd
know about it without paying specific attention.)

I don't know how big the "buildout users w/known multi-version" vs.
"easy_install users w/implicit multi-version" groups are, but I
imagine the combined group has got to be pretty darn big.  ;-)