[Distutils] Using Wheel with zipimport

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:43 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 8:31 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:10 AM, 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.
>>>>
>>>> Paul
>>>
>>>
>>> Here's Paul explicitly mentioning that Wheels being used with zip import is
>>> an incidental benefit and not a core feature.
>>>
>>> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2013-March/020379.html
>>
>> I designed it very intentionally to be compatible with zip import.
>> Otherwise wheels would probably not even be zip files (like pypm
>> packages which are tar) and would achieve greater compression.
>>
>> It may be useful to understand that wheel has *political features* or
>> if you prefer *setting the defaults based on what we have learned from
>> eggs*. I don't recommend that they be zip-imported generally but if
>> you are a consenting adult who understands the caveats you may do so.
>
> Then why did you tell someone on this very list a few hours ago that Wheels
> were not really designed to be zip imported.

It's shorter.