Pip install from source without building a wheel
I have a Python package that includes large PyTorch model checkpoints. I try including those in my setup.py as
package_data = {'mypackage': ['model_weights/*', 'model_weights/sequential_models*']},

Now the problem is whenever I try to install from the source via pip install mypackage/ --no-cache-dir I get a MemoryError. I tried debugging with --verbose and realized that this happens at
creating '/tmp/pip-wheel-bs29bp6a/tmpp0itbxn1/mypackage-1.0-py3-none-any.whl' and adding 'build/bdist.linux-x86_64/wheel' to it
adding 'mypackage/model_weights/distilled_model.pt'
adding 'mypackage-1.0.dist-info/RECORD'
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
File &quot;/zhome/1d/8/153438/miniconda3/envs/testenv/lib/python3.9/zipfile.py&quot;, line 1127, in write
      data = self._compressor.compress(data)
MemoryError
Building wheel for mypackage (PEP 517) ... error
ERROR: Failed building wheel for mypackage

I really only want the installation to copy over the files in model_weights/ to the installation directory. Including them in the wheel appears to be impossible.
Is there a way to suppress this step when running pip install? The package will only be distributed as a source, never on PyPI, as the model_weights files are far too large anyway.

You can run
$ pip install mypackage/ --no-cache-dir --no-binary=mypackage

to skip wheel building (assuming mypackage is actually your distribution name - this is what you pass as name to setup() function).
