<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Kristján Valur Jónsson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kristjan@ccpgames.com" target="_blank">kristjan@ccpgames.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">I’m intrigued. I thought this was merely so that one could do<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">python –m mypackage.mysubpackage<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">Can you refer me to the rationale and discussion about this feature?</span></p></div></div></blockquote>
<div><br>It was part of a fairly long progression in changes to the command line execution support :)<br><br>Top level package execution with -m came first in 2.4, arbitrary package execution for -m arrived in 2.5 (along with the runpy module), directory and zipfile execution (by supplying a valid sys.path entry as the "script" command line argument) was added in 2.6/3.0, and finally officially supported package execution via -m only arrived in 2.7 and 3.1 (a broken version of the last accidentally existed in 2.5, but that was just a mistake that arose when merging the import emulations in runpy and pkgutil, and had a side effect that violated at least one of the import system invariants).<br>
<br>In the specific case of directory and zipfile execution, discussion happened on the tracker: <a href="http://bugs.python.org/issue1739468">http://bugs.python.org/issue1739468</a><br><br>It was never brought up on python-dev because Guido was participating directly in the tracker discussion. Unfortunately, we then also forgot to mention it in the original version of the 2.6 What's New doc, so the vast majority of people missed the addition :(<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Nick.<br><br></div></div>-- <br>Nick Coghlan | <a href="mailto:ncoghlan@gmail.com">ncoghlan@gmail.com</a> | Brisbane, Australia<br>