[Distutils] wheels on sys.path clarification (reboot)

[Noah Kantrowitz]

On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:50 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:

> Signed PGP part
> On 01/29/2014 06:55 PM, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
> 
> > If you are going to document this, and it is not going to be
> > explicitly supported by the spec (it isn't), the _only_ logical thing
> > is to document that this is undefined behavior and while it works now,
> > people should not depend on it. Under no circumstance should we
> > document this as "well it works right now" without guidance about the
> > fact that it isn't part of the spec and is _not_ a candidate for
> > future design decisions. If someone would like to propose amending the
> > spec that can happen separately, but as it stands right now this is
> > nothing but convenient, undefined behavior.
> 
> Nick's point in this thread is that zip-importability is a *necessary
> corrolary* (not an implementation detaiL) of the "no special installers"
> design choice.

No, thats a side effect of various other technologies that are beyond the scope of that spec. The spec should either say "this is undefined behavior" or commit that it is part of the spec. We can't pick this middle ground of "well right now we just get it for free because of X, Y, and Z" because that doesn't express to the reader the true semantics of is this something they can use. Don't assume the reader has as much information as we do about the pros and cons, and about how the implementations work.

--Noah


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