Feature request: Installing package from Zip archive

[amotl]

Dear @jwodder,

we absolutely love your versioningit package, and use it across the board. Thanks a stack for conceiving and maintaining it, with kudos to the community.

Of course it is in the nature of versioningit that it needs a Git installation. Still, it occasionally bothers us, now at crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb#202, that we can't provide preview installation links that reach out to the Zip archive per branch, as provided by GitHub, for example. In this case, we'd like to make the ingredients of the sslmode branch available to downstream users.

uv pip install 'sqlalchemy-cratedb @ https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb/archive/refs/heads/sslmode.zip'

Of course, using the canonical "install from Git" incantation, it works well. However, many people do not use Git, and it is also not installed by default in many Docker builds.

uv pip install 'sqlalchemy-cratedb @ git+https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb@sslmode'

Do you see any chance to improve the situation in our particular use case / scenario?

With kind regards,
Andreas.

[jwodder]

@amotl Assuming these Zip archives expand $Format:PLACEHOLDER$ placeholders on creation, you should be able to switch to the "git-archive" VCS method to embed certain Git versioning details in your package that versioningit can use.

[amotl]

Hi. Thanks a stack for your quick response. It is right on the spot, your proposed solution works well from the start.

• Use versioningit's git-archive method, to support zip archive installs crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb#203

$ uv pip install 'sqlalchemy-cratedb @ https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb/archive/refs/heads/versioningit-git-archive.zip'
Resolved 9 packages in 1.54s
   Built sqlalchemy-cratedb @ https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb/archive/refs/heads/versioningit-git-archive.zip
Prepared 1 package in 1.47s
Uninstalled 1 package in 6ms
Installed 1 package in 2ms
 - sqlalchemy-cratedb==0.41.0.post3+g75585c8 (from git+https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb@75585c8c8e705a121b22791f4e4c21c42017b8f5)
 + sqlalchemy-cratedb==0.41.0.post3+gb4f0542f (from https://github.com/crate/sqlalchemy-cratedb/archive/refs/heads/versioningit-git-archive.zip)