bdist_wheeldoes not support symlinks.bdist_wheeldoes not support overwriting in a convenient way:- whether the distribution is pure-Python
- distribution ABI tag
- Extend Python tag override capability
WARNING: THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL BETA SOFTWARE. THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. ADDITIONAL INCLUDED DISCLAIMERS ALSO APPLY.
Wheel-Axle (Axle, bdist_axle) is a drop-in replacement/augmentation utility for wheel (bdist_wheel)
that extends and builds spec-compliant wheels.
During the build, Axle is able to capture and record symlinks in the following schema paths (locations):
- purelib
- platlib
- scripts
- headers
- data
Additionally, Axle is able to customize the tags via additional command line options.
While the generated wheel is fully spec-compliant, additional symlinks functionality is not possible without its
companion library Wheel Axle Runtime. Thus, every wheel generated by
the bdist_axle automatically becomes dependent on wheel-axle-runtime that provides post-install logic required.
The body of the library is as ugly and messy as distutils/setuptools are, and consists of, mainly, in
hacking/overwriting various setuptools commands to detect, handle and record symlinks and their targets. Once that
problem is solved, the list of symlinks is recorded in the .dist-info/symlinks.txt
in the following CSV format:
- symlink name
- symlink target
- a boolean (0 or 1) flag indicating whether the target is a directory
NOTE: Symlinks may be relative, absolute and/or broken. Symlink targets are recorded verbatim (even when broken) and are NOT otherwise interpreted. THIS IS INTENTIONAL. Please see Wheel Axle Runtime Security Notice for additional information.
A special <distribution name and version>.pth file is also added to the distribution. When the wheel is installed
this .pth file triggers the post-install logic via
wheel-axle-runtime.
python setup.py bdist_wheel <arguments> can be replaced with python setup.py bdist_axle <arguments>. The replacement
is drop-in.
Additional functionality is available via the following options:
--root-is-pure set to manually override whether the wheel is
pure (default: None)
--abi-tag set to override ABI tag (default: None)
Using --python-tag, --root-is-pure and --abi-tag allows you to create wheels that carry platform-dependent data
while otherwise containing pure-Python libraries.