[Python-Dev] pkgutil, pkg_resource and Python 3.0 name space packages

[Steven Bethard]

On Jan 6, 2008 1:07 PM, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 12:03 PM 1/6/2008 -0700, Steven Bethard wrote:
> >Maybe the situation is different here, but having someone installing a
> >different version of sqlite behind my back makes me nervous.
>
> Er, someone who?  Behind whose back?  I'm quite confused by what it
> is that's making you nervous.
>
> Do you worry about people bundling newer versions of say, the
> optparse module or wsgiref with their applications?  If so, why?  Or
> if not, what's different?

I worry about exactly the pyxml problem. Someone installs pyxml on my
system, pyxml replaces xml.parsers.expat with a different version of
pyexpat than the rest of Python, and then programs like mod_python
crash because the two components were compiled against different
versions of a common library. Here's the link again that I posted
earlier:

    http://www.dscpl.com.au/wiki/ModPython/Articles/ExpatCausingApacheCrash

Note that this all happens "behind my back" because I didn't know that
pyxml would be replacing pyexpat in such a way that would cause this
crash.  In fact, I didn't even know that pyxml was installing pyexpat.

Steve
-- 
I'm not *in*-sane. Indeed, I am so far *out* of sane that you appear a
tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity.
        --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy