[Distutils] pip does not work as expected from a zip

[Daniel Holth]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> In wheel's case the idea was to have pip verify that the optional
>> dependency is new enough to work. The part inside pip could be changed
>> to try: import wheel; check(wheel.__version__). IIRC the pip process
>> itself does not directly use anything inside wheel and does not need
>> to "import wheel".
>
> I see what you're saying, but I was commenting about checks for setuptools
> and pip. There's no analogous check for wheel, since as you say, pip doesn't
> use wheel directly.
>
>> However "setup.py bdist_wheel ...", run by pip in a subprocess, will
>> not work unless setuptools can find wheel's plugin declaration. That
>> won't work unless wheel's *.dist-info/entry_points.txt on sys.path.
>
> Yes, I see. Perhaps it's a shame it was implemented that way, if it means
> it's harder or not possible to run pip from a .zip  :-(

I'm suggesting it might be a bug in pkg_resources, or it might be
something pkg_resources can already do, if pip.zip is added to
PYTHONPATH while executing setup.py in a subprocess.