At 12:28 AM 7/4/2009 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
I suspect this limitation of the PEP 302 APIs is the origin of the setuptools format that embeds the metadata inside the distribution - it lets you get at the metadata without having to assume that it exists directly on the filesystem anywhere.
I think you have this backwards; it's setuptools that doesn't care where (or whether) the metadata exists on the file system; it delegates metadata operations to a "metadata provider" that's usually an adapter over a PEP 302 "loader". See http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PkgResources#supporting-custom-impor... for the API details of how to register support for arbitrary PEP 302 importers and loaders. (Which presumably, Lukasz is using. I didn't know that anybody was actually using it, but it's nice to know that the documentation is apparently sufficient for *some* people. ;-) )