[Distutils] Wheel support added to distlib

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wheel is only defined for 1 dist per archive.

Indeed. We did briefly discuss the idea of wheels-within-wheels
somewhere along the line (it may even have been a private email
conversation I had with Daniel about an early version of the wheel
spec), but we ultimately decided it was an aspect of the problem
better left until later.

This was at least partly due to the fact that bundling dependencies is
still evil in many situations, as it's a nightmare for security
updates if you don't get the related packaging tool design right.

If we do decide to tackle that use case for a hypothetical wheel 1.1
release, I'd push for a literal wheels-within-wheels solution: add a
{distribution}-{version}.dependencies folder to the spec, and dump the
wheel archives for any bundled dependencies in there. Installation
tools can then consider that folder as a possible source for
distributions, in addition to already installed distributions and any
online indexes. Once installed, updates would work normally, helping
to avoid the "security updates for bundled distributions are
difficult" problem.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia