Provide sample code for a very basic client

[pfmoore]

I'm finding it hard to understand how the library would be used in practice. In the longer term, this will be covered by the documentation. But for early adopters, having an example of the intended use would be really helpful.

Could an examples directory be added with a very basic client that takes a wheel file and extracts it? I'd go for:

1. Wheel filename given on the command line
2. Options for destinations to unpack to (I'd specifically like the example to not use sysconfig or anything that hides the question of "what locations do I need to support" behind what a given Python installation provides).

Including notes about what isn't supported, compared to something like pip (hash checking? script wrappers?) with a brief note describing how clients would typically implement these, would give a much better feel for the scope of the library, as well.

(My personal concern here is that writing script wrappers is out of scope, but it will be hard for clients to implement without assistance to identify what scripts need writing. I'd like to have sample code that offers a concrete example of how that would play out in reality).

[FFY00]

For the already merged code, you can find an example here. For #9 you have this. When #16 gets merged I will refactor to use it.

[pfmoore]

Thanks - although I'm slightly confused as none of that code seems to import this project. So I'm not entirely sure how it relates to what I asked about?

[FFY00]

Sorry, I should have linked directly to the lines in question.

https://github.com/FFY00/python-install/blob/bc4aa39e16b0445bc7f023faafffdc857c592450/install/__init__.py#L103

https://github.com/FFY00/python-install/blob/77006d8a254f9a724c33d03cfc247c93e99bc5a5/install/__init__.py#L97

Right now the library only provides two things, entry point script generation and record parsing (+ validation with my PR). It is pretty minimal, but the usage is shown in that code. #16 will implement the actual install functionality.

[pfmoore]

Ah, sorry. I did skim for local imports, but missed these.

I'm still a great fan of having a bare-bones usage in an example directory in the repo, but your links are useful as a real-world case.

[FFY00]

I agree 😄.

[pradyunsg]

I'm still a great fan of having a bare-bones usage in an example directory in the repo, but your links are useful as a real-world case.

As noted in #1, the plan is to provide basic implementations of the abstractions, which can actually be used by end users. They'll be importable (instead of sitting in examples/).

Right now, my plan is (1) WheelSource from a local .whl file and (2) Destination based on a dictionary of a {scheme: dir}. These should be enough to cover the "most basic use case", of taking a local wheel file and installing it, without needing to define your own WheelSource/Destination.

[pradyunsg]

Closing, since this is now provided in the documentation, hosted at https://installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

(yes, there's a misnamed object in the example; I've fixed that as part of writing the rest of the documentation)