Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> wrote:
The "single dictionary of names" is in the single archive importer instance and has nothing to do with creating the archive. It is currently programmed this way.
Ah. There is the problem. In Guido's suggestion for the "next path of inquiry" :-), there is no "single dictionary of names". Instead, you have Importer instances as items in sys.path. Each instance maintains its dictionary, and they are not (necessarily) combined.
so the "sys.path contains importers (or strings)" strategy is now officially sanctioned? cool!!! (a quick look in our code base says that this will cause some trouble, unless os.path.isdir() is modified to reject non-strings... after all, if it's not a string, it cannot be a valid directory path, so this does make some sense ;-) another aside: can we have a standard mechanism for listing the contents of a given archive, please? we have a lot of "path scanning" stuff (PIL and PST, among others), and it would be great if things didn't break down if you stuff it all in an archive. something like: for path in sys.path: if os.path.isdir(path): files = os.listdir(path) else: try: files = path.listdir() except AttributeError: files = None if files is None: # no idea what's in here else: # path provides (at least) these modules would be really useful. and yes, it shouldn't have to be mentioned, since squeeze have done it since early 1997, but archive importers should provide a standard way to include non-module resources in the archive, and a standard way to access such resources as ordinary python streams. e.g: file = path.open(name, "rb") or something... </F>