[Distutils] [ANN] pkgdata

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:28 PM 3/25/04 -0500, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>On Mar 25, 2004, at 11:28 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
>>At 11:11 AM 3/25/04 -0500, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>>As per the BOF last night, here is the pkgdata module that I 
>>>mentioned.  Currently the only project using it is pygame.  The 
>>>"sys.datapath" mechanism that I talked about *could actually be 
>>>implemented* on top of this system, supposing an appropriate adapter was 
>>>written to support it!  Remember:  pkgdata is *just a hook*.  It doesn't 
>>>do anything other give the eventual option of doing something smarter 
>>>than os.path.join(os.path.basedir(__file__), data).  When you figure out 
>>>what something smarter is, or you change your mind about what the 
>>>smarter solution is (inside of an app bundle vs. system wide install, 
>>>etc.), you don't have to refactor any of the code that uses pkgdata.
>>
>>Do you plan to support the PEP 302 'get_data()' facility?
>
>Probably not, I don't think anyone ever implemented it, and it seems more 
>complicated than it needs to be.  If someone really does use it, and 
>thinks it should be implemented, please speak up.

Perhaps I was unclear.  What I meant was closer to, "why not expose this 
functionality as methods on a __loader__ attribute of the module, and 
update PEP 302 if needed?"

I'd love there to be a standard facility in Python for doing this, and have 
it be supported for import-from-zip, py2exe, and all the other possible 
routes to importing a module.  As far as I'm aware, PEP 302 is the only PEP 
that even vaguely touches on this, so it seems to make sense to me to 
update it.

As you probably know, PEAK has 'config.fileNearModule()' to do this, but it 
doesn't have any mechanisms for dealing with non-file imports.  I intend to 
try to implement the PEP 302 route once I get around to needing 
it.  (Although, in all honesty I'm unlikely to embrace zipfile imports 
until there's a way to use C extensions in them, at which point it becomes 
a cool way to do simple binary installs of large packages.)