James C. Ahlstrom wrote:
Jean-Claude Wippler wrote:
Ouch - what's wrong with zip archives?
In general Zip archives store whole branches of a file system.
The archive format stores modules as dotted names, just as they appear in the import statement. The search path is "." in every archive file by definition. The import statement "import foo" just results in a dictionary lookup for key "foo", not a search through a zip directory along a local search path for "foo.something" where "something" can be pyc, pyo, py, etc.
The intent was to link the archives to the import statement, not re-create a directory tree. It borrowed this feature from the archive formats of Greg and Gordon.
As I've stated before, I have 2 archive formats. This may seem a needless complication, but my suspicion is that sooner or later, people will want 2 different kinds. One is a .pyz format, which corresponds closely to Jim's .pyl format (with a number of minor differences: it's compressed, the archive as a whole has the Python magic number, instead of each entry, and it's not designed for concatenation). The other is like a zip, and probably should be zip format. It's designed to hold _anything_, and can be manipulated from C and from Python. It can be concatenated and / or embedded (and the innner one opened without extraction). It's table of contents is more file-system like. Importing from one is slower, but that's not really what it's for. It's for packaging up arbitrary resources. Like .pyz's, or Tcl/Tk for Tkinter apps, or configuration files. Jim is correct that a good importer (which can say "No, it's not mine" as quickly as possible) is better satisfied by a simple dictionary lookup than fooling with file extensions and directories (virtual or real).
If you want a marshalled TOC, then why not add a manifest entry for it, sort of like what ranlib does with ar?
Sorry, I don't understand. Please explain.
The table of contents is just another entry.
An important feature is the ability to concatenate to a binary: cat python.exe zip1.zip > myapp.exe Searching for this isn't fast unless magic numbers are at the end. Are zip files recognizable from the end (I don't know)?
Where do you think we got this idea?
Are there any zip experts out there? Can zip files satisfy all the design requirements I listed in pylib.html? Is there zip code available? All my code is in Python.
Hmm. My bookmark appears to be dead (I was there not long ago): http://www.cubic.org/source/archive/fileform/packers/appnote.t xt There have been several references on this list to Guido et al having some Python / zip code. - Gordon