Sorry for the late response. Firstly, I'm not sure to be the most
accurate person to answer this question, but I'll expose here my feeling
about this, maybe others answers will follow.
> One thing i'm still missing from distutils2 is a develop command that
> does at least the linking part the setuptools/distribute equivalent
> does.
IIUC, this command goal is to provide an environment for developers, to
hack on the files, instead of installing them. I'm not sure to
understand what is the linking you're talking about, but I suppose it's
a way to have a development release "hackable".
My opinion is that such command place *is* in distutils2, at least a
simple version of this, as it seems to be an important feature to have.
It will be too bad if all the installer tools implements their own way
to do that.
Cheers,
Alexis
* Not install, since .pth does not handle scripts, headers or data. The
purpose of this command/option is to make modules and packages
importable, more would be trickier.
(“pythonx.y setup.py install_lib --user --link-only” is long, I agree.
This problem is solved with copy/paste, shell history, shell function,
or we could steal the aliases system from setuptools.)
I have a suspicion the install command (or a subcommand) already has
most of what it takes to do this. I’m still trying to understand the
extra_path argument (http://bugs.python.org/issue901727), which may or
may not give us 90% of what’s needed to implement this feature.
This discussion should be summed up on http://bugs.python.org/issue8668
and continued there, for the sake of openness and non-repetition.
Regards
P.S. Terminology fun: you say “editable installs” because of your Pip
background, I think, whereas I think “installed source trees”, with the
reverse viewpoint :)