[Python-Dev] PEP 273: Import Modules from Zip Archives

[Guido van Rossum]

> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> > - I'm not sure I care about having .so files inside packages on the
> >   filesystem; they are useful in Zope, but for very hackish reasons.
> 
> Why? If I write a package which is mostly in Python, it feels very
> natural to put the C extensions also in the package.
> 
> Just

Yes, it does, and as long as it works, I have no problem with that.
Distutils supports this too, AFAIK.

But if there are mechanical problems with making it work (zip files
are a good example of that) I don't see why we should torture
ourselves to get it to work when simpler solutions exist (such as
putting the extension at the top level under a private name with the
package name as a prefix).

BTW, the hackish reasons I referred to are this: Zope often wants to
*replace* existing extensions with its own versions, and places
e.g. its own cPickle.so insize a package to force the import even if
cPickle is built-in statically.  But I'm not sure that that works if
there's a toplevel cPickle.so which has already been imported; it may
work on some systems but fail on others, depending on the shared
library architecture (often one of the most hackish parts of
user-space OS support).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)