Python3 Namespace Packages Using Wheels

I was experimenting with Python3.4 and namespace packages.

Here's what I did.

I created two completely separate repos, A and B.
I had a top level namespace, toplevel.

I created a directory structure:

repoA/toplevel/libA/moda.py
repoA/setup.py

repoB/toplevel/libB/modb.py
repoB/setup.py

The setup.py files were very similar:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name = "toplevel libA",
    version = "0.1",
    packages = ['toplevel.libA']
)

and:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name = "toplevel libB",
    version = "0.1",
    packages = ['toplevel.libB']
)

To be able to work with the bdist_wheel extension to setuptools, I had to use pip to install wheel.

pip install wheel

Then in repoA and repoB it was possible to execute:

python setup.py bdist_wheel -d /tmp/wheels

In this way, two wheels were created:

/tmp/wheels/toplevel.libB-0.1-py3-none-any.whl
/tmp/wheels/toplevel.libA-0.1py3-none-any.whl

I then created a third project repo which used these two wheel packages.

repoC/someotherproject

In this repo, after creating and virtual envirionment, it was possible to install the two wheels:

pip install /tmp/wheels/toplevel.libB-0.1-py3-none-any.whl
pip install /tmp/wheels/toplevel.libA-0.1py3-none-any.whl

In the site-packages directory of the repoC environment there was a tree structure installed:

./toplevel/liba
          /libb

Showing that libA and libB, although separately developed, were available in the client project as a unified namespace. (Note that liba and libb could have been independently installed on different branches of sys.path and they would stilll appear to the interpreter as an integrated whole.)