[Distutils] PEX at Twitter (re: PEX - Twitter's multi-platform executable archive format for Python)

[Daniel Holth]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 3:52 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Thanks for the info.
>
>> For practical reasons we've always needed "not zip-safe" PEX files
>> where all code is written to disk prior to execution (ex:  legacy
>> Django applications that have __file__-relative business logic)
>> so we decided to just throw away the magical zipimport stuff and
>> embrace using disk as a pure cache.
>
> I take it this is because of dependencies (whether your own legacy code
> or external dependencies) that haven't been designed to run from zip, and
> where it's not worth it (or otherwise not possible) to re-engineer to run
> from zip? If there were other reasons (apart from the need to maintain the
> magic machinery, or problems with it), can you say what they were?
>
> Also, is your production usage confined to POSIX platforms, or does
> Windows have any role to play? If so, did you run into any particular
> issues relating to Windows that might not be common knowledge?
>
> I certainly find single-file executables containing Python code a boon
> and hope they play a bigger part in how Python software is distributed.
> I will be looking into PEX for some good ideas :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Vinay Sajip

PEP 441 is mostly about promoting the idea of archives with a #!
module and giving them an extension. It is neat to be aware of PEX and
look forward to some better tooling.