In GitLab by @uranusjr on Feb 17, 2020, 20:29

#23 discussed whether it’d be possible to make the distribution’s _path attribute public. While I understand the rational behind not exposing it, IMO there are cases when a tool wants to find a distribution on disk. One example would be project tools wanting to perform a “clean” operation that cleans up previously-built package metadata.

Under those circumstances, the need is not to find a Distribution, and then locate it on disk (this does not make sense), but to find a dist/egg-info directory on disk (and then turn it into a Distributon; this is already possible with #90). One way to do that would be to add an interface to do something like

def locate_dist_dir(name):
    for path in MetadataPathFinder._search_paths(sys.path):
        if Distribution.at(path).metadata['Name'] == name:
            yield path