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

[Evgeny Sazhin]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:32 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.


pip can't find the distribution then - so it must have the name
totally matching wheel spec, i guess.