Why does pip wheel -r skip editable requirements?

[sbidoul]

After reading the documentation, I'm hoping the release process for my project could look like this:

pip freeze -r dev-requirements.txt > release-requirements.txt
pip wheel -r release-requirements.txt --wheel-dir=release

Since my dev-requirements.txt contains editable references to several VCS controlled directories, pip freeze generates lines such as -e [email protected]:...#egg=.... That looks completely ok so far.

However pip wheel then says Skipping bdist_wheel for ... due to being editable, which is not good. Removing the -e in the frozen requirements does not help because [email protected]:... is not accepted as requirements lines.

So I'm wondering if the above pip freeze + pip wheel is a correct workflow (which I hope).

My main question being why pip wheel needs to skip editable packages. I found a comment by @qwcode in #1775 hinting at something, but I could not understand the rationale. I my use case (ie releasing a project), it is perfectly desirable to have a wheel generated for editable requirements.

[xavfernandez]

Well the point of installing an editable (-e) is to be able to edit the installed directory (without fiddling inside the site-packages). It is based on setuptools's develop command and as such can not be installed via a wheel (at least not in a trivial way, since it does not contain any setup.py file).

You can however pip wheel git+https://github.com/pypa/pip.git or pip wheel git+ssh://[email protected]/pypa/pip.git (without the -e switch).

The [email protected]:pypa/pip.git syntax is currently not supported for non-editable install.

[sbidoul]

@xavfernandez thanks for looking into this. While I think I understand the point of -e, I don't see why I could release my project with pip wheel because there is and editable package in my environment.

Let my explain with a working example. Let's say I'm working on a project called git aggregator.

I first install it with pip install -e git+https://github.com/acsone/git-aggregator.git.

Then when I'm ready to release to production I freeze with pip freeze > frozen-reqs.txt. With frozen-reqs.txt looking like this (edited to remove the -master suffix - see #3296):

argcomplete==1.0.0
colorama==0.3.5
-e [email protected]:acsone/git-aggregator.git@d6a594b7175d9615cad0ca805aa4690ed273500e#egg=git_aggregator
kaptan==0.5.8
PyYAML==3.11

And then I want to package it for production with pip wheel -r frozen-reqs.txt --wheel-dir=release.

And, bummer, the result is incomplete because pip skips my editable package.

Admitedly I could post-process frozen-reqs.txt to remove the -e, etc, but it's a pity to have to do that, especially since reading the documentation on repeatability, I expect the process to be seamless.

Moreover #3379 does work and does not break any test.

[gsemet]

I would like to have an option in pip wheel to force creation of wheel even for editable elements

[sbidoul]

@stibbons this is done in #3695 and will therefore be in the next pip release.

[gsemet]

great ! Thanks!