[Distutils] Deprecating little used file types/extensions on PyPI?

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 18, 2016, at 5:53 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 
> On Aug 17, 2016, at 03:21 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> 
>> This means that the situation we've managed to get to now is that we
>> have wheels as a satisfactory replacement for the "binary
>> distribution" use case, but we haven't even *tried* to replace eggs
>> for the "standalone path entry" use case.
> 
> I'm very sure I don't understand something, because I thought wheels were just
> fine for the import-from-sys.path use case.  I mean, pip does this and in
> Debian, we have a program (dirtbike) that turns installed package's file
> system layouts back into wheels so they can be put on sys.path and imported
> from.


It “Works”, sometimes, if the thing in the wheel doesn’t do something that
might cause that to break. Thus it will work sometimes, but often times it
won’t. It’s not an officially supported feature, but more of a thing where
some decisions were made not to preclude it from working entirely.

As an example, your Debian dirtbike’d pip only actually fully works because
you’ve patched requests. If you didn’t have the patches you’ve applied to
requests, it wouldn’t work. Additionally, pip only works at all because we’ve
been careful to *only* depends on pure Python items that generally work when
zipped (besides the requests thing, which we end up working around in get-pip.py
and just flat out avoiding in ensurepip).

Basically, we don’t go out of our way to prevent it, but if you do it and it
breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

—
Donald Stufft