python-installer/docs/development/design.md

Design and Scope

What this is for

This project is born out of this discussion. Effectively, the volunteers who maintain the Python packaging toolchain identified a need for a library in the ecology that handles the details of "wheel -> installed package". This is that library.

There's also a need for “a fast tool to populate a package into an environment” and this library can be used to build that. This package itself might also "grow" a CLI, to provide just that functionality.

What is provided

• Abstractions for installation of a wheel distribution.
• Utilities for writing concrete implementations of these abstractions.
• Concrete implementations of these abstraction, for the most common usecase.
• Utilities for handling wheel RECORD files.
• Utilities for generating Python script launchers.