How to force pip install --editable to create wheel cache instead of egg?

Question

When I do the following, with verbose flag,

pip install -e file:////path/to/setupdir

I see that it is running setup.py develop underneath and ends up creating .egg instead of .whl

How to force pip creation of wheel instead?

PS: I know that this question is on this topic, but the answer is unsatisfactory (debatable), the link in answer is broken and does not talk about --editable mode

Answer 1

The editable installation mode of pip seems to make use of the special .egg-link format of eggs, so there is probably no simple way to install a python package as a wheel in editable mode.

Editable installs are equivalent to the development mode of setuptools, in this mode, the files are actually not copied to the deployment directory, instead, only a .egg-link file is created in the deployment directory. The .egg-link file contains the path where to find the code of your package. Next to the source code of your package, a .egg-info directory is created to store some metadata. You can find more information about pip editable installs and the setuptools development mode in these pages of the documentations of pip and setuptools.

When using the editable installation mode, we can see in the pip source code here that no wheel is built.

The python package editables seems to provide this option.