[Distutils] Using Wheel with zipimport

[Donald Stufft]

On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:17 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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


There is a very important distinction. Both of those are designed to work
with very specific Wheels and relied on, until this change, private,
undocumented, and undiscussed features of Wheel. It’s not unusual for
the Python standard library to make use of internal APIs to make it’s
features work nor is it unusual for Virtualenv to do that either because of
the nature of it bolting things on to Python that Python wasn’t designed
to do.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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