"FL" == Fredrik Lundh <fredrik@pythonware.com> writes:
FL> can anyone explain why I shouldn't be allowed to ship, say, FL> PIL's Python code in a version-independent ZIP file?
Jeremy Hylton:
Excellent point!
Being the permissive sort, I'd say you should be allowed. But I think it would be foolish.
We ought to collect some requirements/goals for the ZIP import stuff. The current draft of the PEP is a little thin on motivation.
Speed, ease of deployment, minimal disk space. MacPython does it, Jython does it, Installer's been doing it since '98 (although it doesn't use zip format archives).
Requirement: A ZIP archive be usable any version of Python that supports ZIP-based imports.
Hmm. You want .pyc's with every known magic number (there goes disk space)? Or just source and throw away the .pyc? Or maybe insert into the zip file? Either way, there goes speed. Besides, as I noted, and Guido concurred, we need some way to handle extension modules "inside" packages, since they can't go inside the zip. On Windows, extensions are only usable by one version of Python. This is silliness. I have clients with versions 1.52 to 2.1. I have a fair amount of code I reuse, and I keep it version- independent. I have had to change something in it for every Python version to keep it version independent.
It might also be nice to have a imputil- or ihook-based importer that works with older versions of Python.
There's at least one imputil-based one that works with zipfile. - Gordon