PEP 778: Supporting Symlinks in Wheels

[abravalheri (Anderson Bravalheri)]

@rgommers

Would symlinking a directory be allowed at all, and if so is there a use case for that?

The one clear use case is editable installs, but this is not the intent of this PEP, if I am not wrong.

That said, directory symlinks in wheels would massively simplify the “dramas” of editable installs in environments/platforms where they are available^[1].

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1. Example of “dramas”:
   1. PEP 660 suggests creating a “link farm” in a build directory and using a .pth to point to it => The problem with this approach is that users can accidentally remove the directory and break the installation… The other problem with this approach is that pip is not able to “garbage collect” directories that are not listed in the RECORD on the occasion of uninstalls.
   2. Lack of support of static analysis tools for MetaPathFinders/PathEntryFinders ↩︎