[Distutils] [Python-Dev] PEP 365 (Adding the pkg_resources module)

[Paul Moore]

On 18/03/2008, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> Sure...  though I doubt you'll have much luck, unless you drop
>  support for resource_filename, and stick with
>  resource_string()/resource_stream().  Supporting resource_filename()
>  for zipfiles inherently requires that you extract the file somewhere,
>  which is where all the jillions of lines of code for import providers
>  and importer registrations and egg caches and all that other stuff come in.

Yes, I intended to skip resource_filename. It's controversial at best.

>  By contrast, returning a resource string or stream is easy, since you
>  can just delegate to a __loader__ object's get_data, or fall back to
>  filesystem access if the importer is None.

Agreed. I'm not suggesting that anything hard be added, rather that
(relatively) simple things get standardised.

>  In Python 2.5, the pkgutil module grew a bunch of helpful APIs that
>  originally came from pkg_resources.

In which case, the documentation wasn't updated. The 2.5 docs only
mention extend_path.

>  (If you look at pkg_resources in
>  the setuptools 0.7 trunk, it actually uses these new pkgutil APIs,
>  instead of the bundled versions that live in the 0.6 branch.)  You
>  should be able to use pkgutil.get_loader(modulename) to get either a
>  loader or None, and then look for a 'get_data' method from there.

Someone should document these new functions :-( Was it you that added
them? Assuming it was, what's the "simplegeneric" function doing in
there? Can it be moved somewhere more sensible?

I don't particularly want to use undocumented functions - even within
the module that defines them.

Paul.