Digging up the notes from the packaging summit so others don’t need to (the link should take you directly to the comment containing the notes; you don’t need to read the thread from the beginning)
Quasi-summary with thoughts for people to act on directly:
- I think we should use symlinks if possible,
.pthotherwise. Everyone likes to hate.pth, but that’s the best thing we have and standardising something else for this purpose is in yak-shaving territory IMO. We can discuss replacing it after editable is done. - Regarding symlinks, Windows does support it somehow, and virtualenv contains logic to detect it. Maybe it’d be a good idea to split this into a support lib so we can share implementation? I’ll just tag @bernatgabor since you’re in this thread already
- Both code and metadata should be linked in. File exclusion (have files in the source tree but not included in the installation) is not worth the effort, let’s not consider it (i.e. everything in the source tree will be editable-installed, ignoring metadata definition).
- Similar applies to inclusion update, it’s unreasonable to magically add new links when metadata changes. Accept this and require the user to re-install.