Re-add cli library interface

[CarliJoy]

Hi,

first of all, thank you for providing and maintaining this project.

I have been using wheel.cli.[pack|unpack] inside some internal tooling that patches wheels. Since it is available on PyPI and the documentation refers to it as a "library", I was a bit surprised to see the following change:

Made the wheel.cli package private (no deprecation warning)

I only noticed this while trying to update the dependency lock for my tooling.

I tried to understand the motivation behind this change by looking through the related issues, but I may be missing some context. Perhaps someone could clarify the reasoning?

I saw the attempt in #472 to define a public API, which later continued in the packaging discussion here: pypa/packaging#697. As far as I understand, that discussion aimed at defining a more comprehensive API for manipulating wheel files beyond simply packing and unpacking them.

This made me wonder whether pack and unpack could still exist as a small, straightforward Python API mirroring the CLI/argparse interface. That would allow tools to reuse the functionality directly without needing to call the CLI via subprocess.

For example, something like:

def unpack(path: StrPath, dest: StrPath = ".") -> Path: ...
def pack(directory: StrPath, dest_dir: StrPath, build_number: str | None) -> Path: ...

I noticed that the packaging discussion also mentioned a Sans-IO approach. However, users of this functionality are already working with files and IO, so a small convenience API around the existing behavior might still be useful.

Is there a specific reason why this functionality is intentionally CLI-only now, or am I overlooking something?

Thank you for any clarification.

Improved, not generated by LLM

[agronholm]

I made them private to gain freedom for refactoring. They were never intended to be part of the public interface, but the previous maintainer didn't use any separation standard for public/private API. The mention of wheel being a library in the docs is an oversight. The README clearly states that this is a CLI tool. A decision to make wheel into a proper library would be a strategic one so I'd need to mull it over.