On 29 January 2014 11:41, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > > On Jan 29, 2014, at 4:23 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> As I recall, it was in the original version of the PEP/spec and it was >> always an intended feature. The wheel file for the wheel project >> itself is (deliberately) runnable as a zip file, so that you can >> bootstrap into the wheel world using the "wheel install" command. > > I just read every version of the PEP that has ever existed in Mercurial > and no version besides Nick's most recent contains any text about > the importability of Wheels besides that one of the differences of > Wheel and Egg is that Wheel is an installation format and Egg is > importable.
Apologies. It was something Daniel pointed out a few times very early on - I hadn't realised it wasn't in the spec directly. What is in the spec - which effectively constrains the format to *allowing* (rather than encouraging) direct import - are the facts that wheels are zip format, and that one of purelib/platlib is at the root. The concept of separating "unpack" and "spread" and the comment "Although a specialized installer is recommended, a wheel file may be installed by simply unpacking into site-packages" doesn't leave any room for wheels *not* to be importable in the majority of pure-python, no package data, cases. Debating how we present this in later versions of the wheel spec is fine. But deliberately making wheels not importable would break backward compatibility in a way that would have other, likely more serious, implications. Nevertheless, I understand your concerns, and I think we should be very careful not to let people get the impression that this is in any way similar to "importable eggs", which had a very bad press. Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig