[Distutils] question re: local development workflow / egg-info / synced directories

[Chris Jerdonek]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 2:12 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31 March 2016 at 10:00, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 9:22 AM, Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> It would be nice if pip-installing a project directory in editable
>>> mode didn't require writing to the project directory. Is there a
>>> fundamental reason it needs to?
>>
>> I'd speculate that no one was annoyed enough to fix it.
>
> Editable mode is basically managed by setuptools. So any fix would
> need to be in setuptools, not pip.

After your two comments, I searched setuptools's tracker and found the
following issue ("develop does not support placing the egg outside of
the source folder"):

https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/361

So it looks like the feature may already be present in setuptools, but
just not working correctly (i.e. the feature has a bug).

If this feature were working in setuptools, would pip need any changes
to "install -e" to allow passing along this extra info to setuptools,
or is there already a mechanism to allow pass-through of extra
setuptools options?

Thanks,
--Chris


> It's quite possible that the reason
> editable mode doesn't get much love is that from a user's perspective
> it seems like a pip issue, but the pip devs see it as a setuptools
> problem they can't do much about. Not many users have the time or
> inclination to follow up on a bug report with the downstream project,
> so things tend to stay as they are.


>
> Paul