Gordon McMillan writes:
I'd also like to point out that archives *can* be used in a development situation. Obviously I wouldn't bother putting a module under current development into an archive. But if the source is still installed and you haven't mucked with the __file__ attribute when you put it in the archive, then tracebacks will show you what you need. IDLE doesn't know the difference. So for most developers, the standard library can be served from an archive with no effect (other than speed).
I don't see why we can't just add the source to the archive as well; this would allow proper tracebacks even outside the development of the library. Not including sources would cleanly result in the same situation as we currently see when there's only a .pyc file. Am I missing something fundamental? -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> Corporation for National Research Initiatives