[Python-Dev] how important is setting co_filename for a module being imported to what __file__ is set to?

[Brett Cannon]

I am going through and running the entire test suite using importlib
to ferret out incompatibilities. I have found a bunch, although all
rather minor (raising a different exception typically; not even sure
they are worth backporting as anyone reliant on the old exceptions
might get a nasty surprise in the next micro release), and now I am
down to my last failing test suite: test_import.

Ignoring the execution bit problem (http://bugs.python.org/issue6526
but I have no clue why this is happening), I am bumping up against
TestPycRewriting.test_incorrect_code_name. Turns out that import
resets co_filename on a code object to __file__ before exec'ing it to
create a module's namespace in order to ignore the file name passed
into compile() for the filename argument. Now I can't change
co_filename from Python as it's a read-only attribute and thus can't
match this functionality in importlib w/o creating some custom code to
allow me to specify the co_filename somewhere (marshal.loads() or some
new function).

My question is how important is this functionality? Do I really need
to go through and add an argument to marshal.loads or some new
function just to set co_filename to something that someone explicitly
set in a .pyc file? Or I can let this go and have this be the one
place where builtins.__import__ and importlib.__import__ differ and
just not worry about it?

-Brett