Keep the link when building wheels.

[wqh17101]

Hi there,
I have a dir to pack. And there are some links in it.Like

a.so
a.so.1 -> a.so
b.so
b.so.1 -> b.so

but when i build wheels, it generated a package that

a.so
a.so.1 
b.so
b.so.1

It lost their links. It cause that the size of package is double than expected.

[wqh17101]

Maybe

wheel/src/wheel/wheelfile.py

Line 142 in c05b6b4

with open(filename, "rb") as f:

cause the problem.

[agronholm]

The wheel spec does not have a specified way to describe symbolic links in RECORD. Besides, symlinks are not properly supported on Windows, causing potential compatibility conflicts. If you wish to get a decision about symlink support, I suggest that you open a new discussion in the packaging forum of discuss.python.org.

[pfmoore]

There's an existing discussion here. Better to contribute there than to open a new topic and split the conversation.

[leofang]

xref: #203

[rgommers]

Here is another use case besides shipping shared libraries: support for editable installs when the build system uses out-of-place builds. Out-of-place builds are the only option in Meson, and also good practice for CMake. For out-of-place builds, you ends up with compiled extension modules and generated files in the build directory, and .py files in the source directory. To put those together into a working editable install, the most straightforward solution is putting symlinks to all files in a wheel and installing those. xref mesonbuild/meson-python#47 for more details.

[agronholm]

There's no point in asking for this here, when the wheel spec itself doesn't even support symlinks. If that is ever added to the spec, a new issue should be created.

[rgommers]

@agronholm I just provided a second use case, which seemed to be missing so far. Guess I'll take it over to the Discourse thread.

You may want to close gh-400 as well.

[pfmoore]

@rgommers Symlink support in wheels seems to me like a very useful thing to have. But as @agronholm says, it's not currently part of the wheel spec, so it would need a PEP and a new wheel version. You might be interested in this post I just made, and its associated thread, as well as the thread I linked to previously.

[rgommers]

@pfmoore thanks! Our comments just crossed paths, I posted it in the Discourse thread you linked above. I'll keep an eye on both threads.