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

[Evgeny Sazhin]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing that might be useful would be to develop the "unpacked
> wheel" which is currently undefined but would be deliberately
> identical to a site-packages with just one wheel extracted into it.
> You wouldn't have to argue or worry about the zip issue.
>
> I like the way npm puts everything into a directory
> ~/.npm/packagename/0.4.2/ ... for example, gem is similar. If you
> really wanted to go to town you could figure out how to do virtualenvs
> with hardlinks or reflinks instead of copies (conda can).
>
> But as has been repeated you won't find robust support for this in the
> existing code.
>

I just tested it - it works! Yeah!

I put an unzipped wheel of my API project into a local wheelhouse -
pip was able to install from it into my virt env for the client
project.
Then i created a wheel with __main__.py for the client project and put
an unzipped version in wheelhouse.

After that i issued:
PYTHONPATH=~/wheelhouse/projectAPI.whl; python ~/wheelhouse/projectClient.whl

It worked!

Is this workflow OK to rely on in future?

Thanks,
Eugene