Okay, so I've spent a bit more time thinking this through, and I think I have a plan that can work, and deals with all the weird little corner issues, including overlapping code with pkg_resources (a new module that's to-be-added by setuptools). My basic idea is as follows: 1. Move the support code from runpy to pkgutil and expose most of it as actual APIs. 2. Move additional code from pkg_resources to pkgutil and merge with the stuff brought over from runpy, fleshing it out enough so that pydoc can use it to find modules, subpackages, etc., and so that pkg_resources' other code uses pkgutil instead of having that stuff "in-house". 3. Write up docs for the expanded pkgutil 4. Add find_loader([path]), get_loader(module), and get_importer(string[,path_hooks]) functions to the 'imp' module, with pure-Python versions in pkgutil that kick in if the C ones are missing. (See next item for why.) 5. Distribute the Python 2.5 'pkgutil' module with setuptools releases for older Python versions, so that setuptools won't have to keep duplicates of the code I pulled out in item #2 above. Part of what would be being copied to pkgutil from pkg_resources is the "resource provider API", that allows you to treat a module, package, or sys.path entry as a kind of virtual filesystem. pydoc needs this in order to be able to document with zipped packages, and to find modules or packages on sys.path that are in zipfiles. (E.g. to document a zipped standard library package or module.) pkg_resources has been out there for almost a year now, and is widely used as part of easy_install and the egg runtime facilities, but it's a very large module and contains lots of other code besides the virtual filesystem stuff. So, this seems like the simplest way to share the virtual filesystem code between pydoc and setuptools, without making the former depend on the latter. It does also mean creating an addition to PEP 302: an optional method on importers and loaders that would allow obtaining a virtual filesystem for that path location or package. I believe this and the setuptools checkin can be completed by Monday evening, although the documentation might not be fancy at that point. I don't know when the documentation cutoff for alpha 2 is, but I assume I'd have time to finish fleshing it out, at least for the pkgutil bit and the PEP update. Anybody have any thoughts, comments, or questions?