[Distutils] distlib.mount API design (was: wheels on sys.path clarification (reboot))

[Paul Moore]

On 30 January 2014 22:38, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The advantage of wheels over plain zipfiles for this use case is the
> structured metadata. distlib.mount doesn't try to guess the package
> structure for the extensions, you have to provide an EXTENSIONS file in the
> metadata that explains what C extensions are present and how they should map
> into the module namespace.

OK, I think I get the idea now.

I'm still not comfortable with the temp directory clutter that
unpacking leaves (in particular on Windows where deletion isn't even
possible in an atexit routine) but I'll survive.

I *would* like to see the various technical issues and implications in
the API documentation, though. The implications and limitations, and
in particular the manual cache management requirements, need to be
made explicit. (I thought I'd seen docs somewhere, but they definitely
aren't in the API reference for the distlib.wheel module).

Paul