PEP 778: Supporting Symlinks in Wheels

[emmatyping (Emma Smith)]

@pf_moore

Speaking with my PEP delegate hat on, I’d like to suggest some caution here. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves discussing details of symlink support, and especially of how installers will handle the transition, when there’s not even a proposal for Wheel 2.0 yet.

This is a very fair critique. I think that I had hoped to have a draft of PEP 777 to start discussion with at this point, but that hasn’t happened.

@pf_moore

If there’s multiple proposals, they will each need their own version bump - or they are going to have to be presented and approved as a group, which will significantly complicate the whole process.

I agree this is very sub-optimal, but on the other hand I don’t want to bump the wheel major version 3 or 4 times and have each of those need a 3-5 year deployment. Which I think we agree is not a great solution either.

@pf_moore

To be clear, I think one of the big problems here is that wheel format versioning needs a rethink - as the “what will pip do with version 2.0 wheels” subthread established, a major version bump is very disruptive, and yet no-one has come up with a plausible example of something that would be a minor version bump. So unless we come up with something better, every bit of new functionality is hugely disruptive, and we end up trying to make “kitchen sink” changes bundling all the functionality improvements that are currently blocked on a version bump into one change.

Yeah, I hope there is a better way to handle this. I have created How to reinvent the wheel to discuss how to handle feature bumps in wheel. Let’s discuss over there how to proceed.

Worst case we end up back on “all at once changes are the only route”