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

[Daniel Holth]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:15 PM, Evgeny Sazhin <eugene at sazhin.us> wrote:
> 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

The only request is that you don't name the directory ".whl" because
that is a little bit confusing.

"Directories with only one package installed into them" will continue to work.