[Distutils] [proposal] version-free + lookup-friendly dist-info location

[Nick Coghlan]

On 17 March 2017 at 19:58, Ronny Pfannschmidt <
opensource at ronnypfannschmidt.de> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> while looking over the recent peps i noticed that we keep a few inherent
> inefficiencies in where to find dist-info folders
>
> because they include version numbers, to get a distribution we have to
> search for it
> which is no longer really sensible as we no longer have multi-version
> installation in any upcoming standard.
>
Linux distros still use multi-version installation fairly regularly - it's
how services like EPEL are able to offer parallel installs of frameworks
and libraries that are also in base RHEL/CentOS without breaking anything.

The associated code to populate __main__.__requires__ and hence get
pkg_resources.require() to do the right thing isn't pretty, but it *does*
work.

While I expect tech like virtual environments, Software Collections,
FlatPak, Snappy, etc, to eventually get us to the point where even Linux
distros don't need parallel installs into the system site-packages any
more, we're still a *looong* way from it being reasonable to assume that we
can just drop parallel install support from the Python packaging tools in
general.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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