PEP 660 editable installations support
"PEP 660 -- Editable installs for pyproject.toml based builds (wheel based)" was accepted. I started having a look at what it takes to support editable installs or development builds.
With PEP 660 a wheel is created that contains some files for locating the editable installation. The PEP suggests several possibilities, such as a .pth
file, symbolic links, or some helper code such as the editables
library.
With meson, a separate build directory is created. By default, this directory mirrors the layout of the source directory. I therefore think the way forward is to find a way to "merge" these two directories, virtually that is.
I think it is possible to use editables
to do this merging. The file builddir/meson-info/intro-installed.json
, already used for building a wheel, not only lists installation paths, but also source and build paths. By taking those, and converting them to module names, we have what we need for editables
.