On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:
The wheel implementation makes sure all the metadata (the .dist-info directory) is at the end of the .zip archive. It's possible to read the metadata with a single HTTP partial request for the end of the archive without downloading the entire archive.
Sounds good, but can you point to any example code which does this? As I understand it, for .zip files you have to read the last part of the file to get a pointer to the directory, then read that to find where each file in the archive is, then seek to a specific position to read the file contents.
ISTR that this is especially true for zipimport: I think it depends on a zipfile signature being present at the *end* of the file. Certainly, the standard for .exe and shell wrappers for zipfiles is to place them at the beginning of the file, rather than the end.