1.6 KiB
Concepts
This library has two main abstractions:
- {any}
WheelSource: Serves as source of information about a wheel file. - {any}
WheelDestination: Handles all file writing and post-installation processing.
WheelSource
These objects represent a wheel file, abstracting away how the actual file is stored or accessed.
This allows the core install logic to be used with in-memory wheel files, or
unzipped-on-disk wheel, or with {any}zipfile.ZipFile objects from an on-disk
wheel, or something else entirely.
This protocol/abstraction is designed to be implementable without a direct dependency on this library. This allows for other libraries in the Python packaging ecosystem to provide implementations of the protocol, allowing for more code reuse opportunities.
One of the benefits of this fully described interface is the possibility to decouple the implementation of additional validation on wheels (such as validating the RECORD entries in a wheel match the actual contents of the wheel, or enforcing signing requirements) based on what the specific usecase demands.
WheelDestination
These objects are responsible for handling the writing-to-filesystem
interactions, determining RECORD file entries and post-install actions (like
generating .pyc files). While this is a lot of responsibility, this was
explicitly provided to make it possible for custom WheelDestination
implementations to be more powerful and flexible.
Most of these tasks can either be delegated to utilities provided in this
library (eg: script generation), or to the Python standard libary (eg:
generating .pyc files).