[Distutils] pkg_resources: feature request

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:16 PM 9/28/2005 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I just added a WSGI app in paste.urlparser.PkgResourceParser
>(http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/branches/mainline-refactor/paste/urlparser.py) 
>
>to serve static files using pkg_resources's resource API.  Two new
>methods would be useful there: resource_mtime and resource_size.
>Alternately, resource_stat, which would return an os.stat-compatible
>object.  But a lot of what os.stat returns doesn't apply well to a zip
>file entry, even if mtime and size do.  I'm not sure if mtime should be
>the mtime of the zip file itself, or the date_time of the entry.

FYI, if you use resource_filename() and stat the file, you'll get the 
datetime of the file as it was in the zip, as well as the size.  If you've 
opened the file for reading using resource_stream(), then you can try using 
seek() and tell() to find the file size.  I believe StringIO (used for zip 
files) and regular file objects support that.

I'll think about adding more direct ways to query those things, but in the 
meantime those are some good ways to get the information from the existing 
implementation.  I realize you may not want to unpack the zipfile to disk 
(as resource_filename does), but it's cached on disk thereafter, and with 
some servers you could potentially take advantage of static file serving 
that way.  And in the case of an egg that was installed unzipped (or a 
project that's under development via "setup.py develop"), the file will 
already be on disk and resource_filename() is just telling you where it is.