[Distutils] Using Wheel with zipimport

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 January 2014 23:10, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 January 2014 12:58, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You can campaign to deprecate that feature *if* we ever want to make a
>> change to the wheel format that is incompatible with it.
>
> Note that virtualenv uses the ability to run wheels from sys.path. I
> don't believe that virtualenv should be a "special exception" here,
> nor do I want it to rely on accidents of the implementation.
>
> So from my POV, pypa is already shipping code that relies on this
> behaviour being by design.

Not just PyPA - this feature is at the heart of how the ensurepip
module in the standard library works.

This approach is explicitly documented in PEP 453:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0453/#implementation-strategy

Cheers,
Nick.

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