Support for editable dependencies with URLs

[krmax44]

While uv supports dependencies from URLs (like uv pip install git+https://github.com/pallets/flask.git), they can't be installed with the -e flag:

$ uv pip install -e git+https://github.com/pallets/flask.git
error: Editable must refer to a local directory, not a Git URL

For multi-repo projects, this would be nice to have.

[zanieb]

Hi! What does it mean to have an editable installation of a remote git dependency?

[krmax44]

Thanks for your quick reply! From my understanding, there is little difference than with the -e flag omitted. With the -e flag however, an existing repository is updated upon re-running the install command (see below), without a new clone is made.

Updating ./.venv/src/froide-fax clone (to revision main)
  Running command git fetch -q --tags
  Running command git reset --hard -q 09a7bcec76d3da6b2003516a775ed5657a7cc062

[charliermarsh]

As of now we intentionally don't support this. It adds a lot of complexity and we actually don't re-clone at all upon re-running the install command (we have a cache that contains a copy of each repository, and we checkout-and-install as needed with incremental fetches).

[zanieb]

I think we always cache git clones anyway, though I'm not sure about the nuances of our behavior here. Are you having problems with our behavior specifically?

[krmax44]

Just dropping the -e works fine as of now :)

[zanieb]

Thanks! Let us know if you have more questions / a use-case that's not addressed.

[krmax44]

I found another difference: With -e, all files from the repository are available within .venv/src. WIthout, only relevant files (presumably as configured with setuptools) will be stored in site-packages. This is quite important to us, as we also include JavaScript files in the repo we need to access. (We can probably include these somehow with setuptools.)