[Distutils] Platform specific destinations in wheel files?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 27 December 2013 12:34, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     data: directory for data files.
>>
>> This is still only a half-baked idea at this point, but I'm currently
>> leaning towards keeping the "<name>.data" sysconfig subdirectories in
>> the wheel format cross platform (and somewhat Python specific), and
>> adding a new "<name>.app" subdirectory in parallel.
>
>
> It's important to point out that the distutils/setuptools implementation of
> installing setup "data_files" offers a loophole now to achieve the "app"
> notion (at least when installing from sdist).
>
> When "data_files" paths are absolute, it honors them as absolute, allowing
> you to install anything/anywhere, if you have privileges (otoh when paths
> are relative, they go into the sysconfig "data" path as you would expect)
>
> as noted, wheel installs have no such mechanism, because there's just
> "*.data" and it maps to sysconfig "data" in the pip wheel installer.  Also
> note that bdist_wheel actually does the wrong thing now with absolute
> "data_files" paths by letting them end up relative to site-packages
> https://bitbucket.org/dholth/wheel/issue/92/bdist_wheel-makes-absolute-data_files)
>
> but I agree we need something more than "data" for platform-specific data
> files.

Yeah, I don't think it's an urgent problem, but I believe it's one we
will want to solve eventually. If we do another packaging BoF in
Montreal (and hopefully we'll have the numbers for it to make sense to
do so), that could be a good opportunity to bounce a few ideas around
without spamming the list with more incomplete designs like my initial
attempt.

Cheers,
Nick.

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