[Distutils] additional paths in wheel

[Daniel Holth]

For example, a wheel has these directories:

pyramid-1.4.data/scripts/prequest
pyramid-1.4.data/scripts/pshell

With custom paths it could also have

pyramid-1.4.data/spam/pharmacy.txt

and "paths" : { "spam" : "$datadir/pyramid/junkmail" }

pharmacy.txt would be installed into $datadir/pyramid/junkmail/pharmacy.txt

It would also be appealing to be able to interpolate the package name
and version into the "paths" dictionary...


On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 4, 2014, at 1:58 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's always been obvious that wheel would probably need additional
>> paths besides the sysconfig ones, and there's been some discussion
>> here recently.
>>
>> For the next version we should:
>>
>>
>> The next version of the Wheel spec?
>
> This would be Wheel 2.
>
> It would still include WHEEL with the file format version, older
> clients would be able to show the error.
>
> Why allow paths to be written in a .py? The .py would be purely
> declarative; it would allow a program to find its files without using
> any pkg_resources API. IMO it's important to allow programs to work
> without iterating over the metadata of all installed packages or
> without participating in the package management system at all.
>
> # possibly only the paths that were actually used...
> paths = { 'prefix':'/usr/local/', 'bindir':'/usr/local/bin' , ...}
> # OR
> PREFIX="/usr/local"
> BINDIR="/usr/local/bin"
> MANDIR="/usr/local/share/man/..."
>
>> 1. Add the autoconf dirs.
>> https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html.
>> "packagename-1.0/data/dvidir/" or any of the other autoconf paths
>> would be valid, in addition to the existing distutils paths. (The
>> autoconf paths are defined relative to a $prefix, in Python's case
>> $prefix is usually the base of the virtualenv).
>>
>>
>> Sounds plausible.
>>
>>
>> 2. Replace WHEEL with wheel.json. wheel.json contains all the
>> information from WHEEL but is json which is rather popular these days.
>>
>> wheel.json may contain custom paths with string Template() interpolation.
>>
>> { "paths": "name":"$prefix/mypath", "othername":"$bindir/etc",
>> "thirdname": "$othername/subfolder" }
>>
>> (the sysconfig names, autoconf names, and custom path names can be
>> interpolated here)
>>
>>
>> I don’t understand this paths stuff, what is it supposed to be doing
>
> Instead of just having predefined paths in the
> packagename-1.0.data/[path] directories, the user could define
> additional values for "path" in the {"path" : "installation
> directory"} dictionary used by wheel installers. (I'm not 100% sure
> this proposed feature does not cause more problems than it solves...)
>
>> Also with JSON, the problem is the current tooling is now setup to
>> handle a key: value WHEEL store, so we’ll need some sort of a migration
>> path for old tools to know that this is a Wheel they can’t handle. It’s
>> possible that it’s not worth it to do this.
>
> They would just contain a stub WHEEL advertising version 2.
>
>> ---
>> Donald Stufft
>> PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
>>