Editable installs and PyPI distribution compatibility

Editable install requirements and PyPI distribution compatibility

0 reputation · 01 Jan 2021, 17:10 UTC

17.3K views0

The supported feature under review is pip editable installs and how they interact with PyPI distribution artifacts. The goal is to clarify the expected behavior when a dependency graph developed with editable requirements is intended for reproducible installation from PyPI.

Editable installs reference a local source tree and are common in development workflows. Production builds typically consume wheels or source distributions uploaded to PyPI, and optional dependencies declared via extras may be present in a local environment without being explicitly pinned for distribution. Version pinning and environment isolation also differ between local and production contexts.

What is the documented resolution behavior for an editable requirement when the package is later consumed as a PyPI artifact? How are optional extras handled when the base package is listed without extras in a requirements file? Is there a defined way to ensure that a development-time dependency set maps consistently to a production install from PyPI?

Keep exploring this topic

Does Poetry isolate optional extras per project in shared virtual environments?

Poetry's resolver reportedly does not differentiate mandatory and optional dependencies when computing the dependency graph, and it lacks per-project optional isolation. This raises questions about extras in shared virtual environments across 1.x and 2.x.

Yanked releases skipped in ranges but allowed on exact pins under PEP 592

PyPI PEP 592 yanking avoids yanked releases in version ranges but allows exact pins. Teams need clarity on policy enforcement and installer differences.

PyPI JSON API ↔ pip Client: Coordinating Per-Connection Timeouts with Total Operation Deadlines During Multi-Package Resolution

PyPI's APIs lack server-side timeouts; pip enforces per-connection limits but has no total-operation deadline for multi-package resolution. No cancellation token propagates across resolver, downloader, and transport layers, making cooperative aborts and predictable wall-clock bounds difficult.

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement when migrating indexes with overlapping package names

Pip's non-deterministic index priority during PyPI migration causes intermittent version-satisfaction errors when overlapping packages exist across legacy and new indexes. PEP 708 adoption remains incomplete, leaving no enforced source-based resolution.

What pip does with editable requirements

When you run pip install -e ., pip records a local path in the environment’s site‑packages. That reference shows up in pip show but never gets baked into the wheel or sdist you later upload to PyPI. The wheel’s METADATA contains only install_requires and extras_require from setup.cfg or pyproject.toml. Thus a consumer who pip install my‑pkg from PyPI sees only those dependencies; any editable dependency you had locally is invisible to the distribution. If you want the same optional extras in production, list them explicitly in a lockfile or call pip install my‑pkg[extra].

pip install my-pkg[dev]

Editable install requirements and PyPI distribution compatibility

0 answers

Your perspective belongs here.

1 question comment

What pip does with editable requirements

Good answers start here.