[Distutils] Self-contained boostrap scripts [was: Re: A new, experimental packaging tool: distil]

[Daniel Holth]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 3:49 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com> wrote:
>> And, I'm almost certain that most if not all existing ZIP tools on Windows will fail to open files with a shebang, since they've never had to deal with them.
>
> Actually, the opposite is true, at least for 3rd-party (non-Microsoft)
> archiving tools: they work even when there's a whole .exe file stuck
> on the front.  ;-)
>
> Some of them require you to rename from .exe to .zip first, but some
> actually detect that an .exe is a stub in front of a zip file and give
> you extraction options in an Explorer right-click.
>
> So, no worries on the prepended data front, even if the extension is
> .zip.  What you probably can't safely do is *modify* a .zip with
> prepended data...  and there I'm just guessing, because I've never
> actually tried.

It will all work. ZIP is cool! Every offset is relative from the end
of the file.

The wheel distribution even has a ZipFile subclass that lets you pop()
files off the end by truncating the file and rewriting the index. This
will work on any ordinary zip file that is just the concatenation of
the compressed files in zip directory order, without data or extra
space between the compressed files.