[Distutils] Re: new import mechanism and a "small" distribution

[Just van Rossum]

Greg Stein wrote:
>get_code() is *NOT* a public method. It is for subclasses to override.

Oh, ok. But that makes it very specific to your implementation. I'd like to
see a much more general idea. I'm sure that it's there in your code but it
is not very clear...

>The "public method" is the _import_hook method, but it isn't really
>public, as it gets installed into the import hook. However, it wouldn't
>be hard to add "__call__ = _import_hook" to the Importer class. That
>would provide the appropriate callable interface.

I see, that makes sense. Then the idea could boil down to something like this:

Each element of sys.path is either of these:
- a string, in which case the "classic" importer will do the work.
- a callable object, which must have the same interface (signature) as the
current __import__ hook.

(that's basically where you started, right?)


Just