[Import-SIG] making it feasible to rely on loaders for reading intra-package data files

[Paul Moore]

On 1 February 2014 18:44, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> Over on distutils-sig it came up that getting people to not simply assume
> that __file__ points to an actual file and thus avoid using open() directly
> to read intra-package files is an issue. In order to make using a loader's
> get_data reasonable (let alone set_data), there needs to be a clear
> specification of how things are expected to work and make sure that
> everything that people need is available.

An alternative suggestion - now that Python 3.4 has pathlib, how
practical would it be to create a ZipFilePath subclass that acted as a
concrete path for files in a zipfile? Getting people to use pathlib
for dealing with __file__ rather than the old os.path functions might
be an easier sell, and if pathlib handled zipfiles "behind the scenes"
we could avoid the whole issue.

Paul.