[Distutils] Easy install and zipimporter

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:47 PM 11/10/2007 +0100, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I've been implementing zipimport module recently for the pypy 
>project and I came to the following problem:
>
>When zipimport is there, easy install is mangling with 
>zipimport._zip_directory_cache, which is
>a) undocumented in importer protocol
>b) starts with an _
>c) explodes when I compile pypy and import site.py (providing that 
>I've got easy_install installed)
>
>Any propositions what to do here? Just providing 
>_zip_directory_cache is not really an option, since it has no documentation

 >>> import zipimport
 >>> help(zipimport)
Help on built-in module zipimport:

NAME
     zipimport - zipimport provides support for importing Python 
modules from Zip archives.

FILE
     (built-in)

MODULE DOCS
     http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-zipimport.html

DESCRIPTION
     This module exports three objects:
     - zipimporter: a class; its constructor takes a path to a Zip archive.
     - ZipImporterError: exception raised by zipimporter objects. It's a
       subclass of ImportError, so it can be caught as ImportError, too.
     - _zip_directory_cache: a dict, mapping archive paths to zip directory
       info dicts, as used in zipimporter._files.



>and no unittests,

Well, the tests in test_zipimport *clear* it.


>which means it might change at any moment.

Why?  Note, by the way, that as of Python 2.5, the pkgutil module 
also makes use of this variable.