[Distutils] supporting editable installs by PEP-517/518 by shim wheels - proposing a common implementation

[Paul Moore]

On 7 September 2017 at 14:26, RonnyPfannschmidt
<opensource at ronnypfannschmidt.de> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> i'd like to propose a common tooling for installing packages in editable
> mode
> which is based on generating an actual wheel, which includes shim files
> for the python packages
> allows to sanely instal/uninstall editable packages

So pip install -e ., instead of installing a .pth file which included
the current directory on sys.path, would install a set of .py files
which loaded the actual code from the current directory? That sounds
like a plausible approach, and it would certainly stop editable
installs being quite as much of a special case as they currently are.
One thought - how would you handle C extensions?

In principle, though, this sounds like a good idea.

Paul