[Distutils] Using Wheel with zipimport

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Jan 30 23:30:14 CET 2014


Thanks for pointing that out Noah - I was planning to come back and check
if that wording was considered more acceptable.

On 31 Jan 2014 07:12, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> The updated text is fine with me as it at least accurately documents the
fact that using that
> feature is fraught with peril and reads more of a documentation of the
behavior than
> anything else.

Aye, clearly explaining "yes, you *can*, but that doesn't mean you
*should*" was always my primary goal with the new FAQ entry. Until you
commented on the original update, I didn't realise there might be a
perception that this egg-replacement use case didn't need to be taken into
account in designing future iterations of the wheel format, and it was only
after I went back and watched the PyCon 2013 panel video that I realised we
had likely run afoul of the "conference curse" where a shared offline
understanding hadn't been properly captured in the online materials (it's
also possible Daniel and I discussed it privately back before the wheel
spec became a PEP, but I didn't dig back that far into my email archives).

>
> So thanks for the final (I hope?) update Nick, and sorry this thread got
all ragey.

Hah, if you want to see ragey, look up the epic PEP 343 threads between me
and PJE before Guido broke the deadlock by proposing to just remove the
cause of the argument entirely (the implicit dynamic context manager
support that was in the originally accepted with statement design turned
out to be thoroughly confusing because it made it too hard to come up with
consistent terminology for the new concepts involved).

I know all too well how disconcerting it can be to find that someone else
has a significantly different interpretation of a spec that appeared to be
crystal clear (especially a case like this where the written spec *was*
clear, but missing a critical detail).

I'm also nowhere near hypocritical enough to berate anyone *else* for
passionately objecting to a course of action that appears to lead places we
don't want to go :)

> On the plus side this spurred me into trying to put the thoughts I've had
for a newer Wheel
> format down into a PEP and I think it's turning out well so far :]

Huzzah! Turning caremad into PEPs can be surprisingly cathartic (cf. PEP
462).

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372
DCFA
>
>
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