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

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Am 07.09.2017 um 17:43 schrieb 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?
> 

for c extension im not quite sure, is python finally able to load them
from folders belonging to a package?

else something far more painful might be necessary

but since c extensions need a rebuild anyway, it may be reasonably
inexpensive to just put them into the wheel in the other case

but id strongly prefer just having them inside of the package discovered
via __path__

-- Ronny

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