Package writes to "apiclient" directory when installed

[kruton]

Environment details

• OS type and version: Linux
• Python version: 3.12.5
• pip version: 24.2
• google-api-python-client version: 2.145.0

Steps to reproduce

1. python -m virtualenv venv
2. . venv/bin/activate
3. pip install api-client
4. python -c 'from apiclient import HeaderAuthentication'
5. pip install firebase-admin
6. python -c 'from apiclient import HeaderAuthentication'

I expect step 6 to be the same as step 4 here, but it results in a stack trace since firebase-admin depends on google-api-python-client which is overwriting .../site-packages/apiclient/. What's even worse is that some package managers (e.g., poetry) seem to install this in a random order resulting in it sometimes working and sometimes not.

Code example

from apiclient import HeaderAuthentication

Stack trace

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name 'HeaderAuthentication' from 'apiclient' (/private/tmp/test1/venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/apiclient/__init__.py)

[ohmayr]

Thanks for reporting this @kruton. We'll take a look into this.

[kruton]

I rebased the pull request #2486 onto the newest release.