Okay, I am creating this issue to keep track of undefined wheel behaviors, special setuptools handlings and relevant missing features from the wheel spec. The intent is to figure out all issues with the current wheel specification and maybe in the future draft a PEP.

Questions

• Is .data directly mapped to sysconfig?
  • Even on Windows?
    • Because then we would have a Linux style directory structure (share/something/mydata)

Missing features

• Support for sysconfdir
  • Holds application configuration data
  • Would also require it to be added in the sysconfig module
  • Usually mapped to /etc on Linux
• Custom platform-dependent paths
  • A valid use case would be for eg. install UDEV rules on Linux

cc @pradyunsg
Maybe you are interested.

I am not sure about this. This would be a feature for end users wanting to install wheels this way, but if you care about dependencies you might want to use a package manager like pip.

If we do check for dependencies, there will be a CLI option to turn it off/on (the opposite of whatever the default is). Like we have in https://github.com/FFY00/python-build.

I want the --prefix and --root arguments to work as it is done on setuptools/distutils (when using setup.py install) or pip's.

I was trying to use this on MSYS2's packages but I couldn't find an option to change the prefix without which it would use absolute windows path which can't be used in packages. For example, see file difference on a CI run here.

Thanks for this project.

See https://packaging.python.org/specifications/entry-points/

Trying to install black's wheel with python-install, will produce the binary blackd with the following contents:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
import sys
from blackd import patched_main [d]
if __name__ == "__main__":
    sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r"(-script\.pyw|\.exe)?$", "", sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(patched_main [d]())

which of course doesn't work. python-install should not include the [d] in the file.

This is the contents of entry_points.txt for black's wheel:

[console_scripts]
black = black:patched_main
black-primer = black_primer.cli:main
blackd = blackd:patched_main [d]

Can you clarify (possibly add to a README) what the difference between this project and pypa/installer is? https://github.com/pypa/installer

The names and purposes seem very similar.