[Python-Dev] Modules that run other scripts

[Nick Coghlan]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Nick Coghlan wrote:
> 
>> For that second part:
>> 1. Is it even worth doing at this stage? I'm not sure to what degree the
>> new command line flexibility has even been adopted by third party
>> application packagers, so I have no idea how large the pool of potential
>> users might be. Should I instead wait until we start seeing complaints
>> that these tools can't be used with script references that the main
>> command line will handle quite happily?
> 
> There is a small, but important class of "scripts that run scripts",
> which are mostly all development tools (e.g. coverage, my line_profiler,
> etc.). Doing this correctly in all of the corner cases is reasonably
> tricky, so I think this is a perfect case for having the functionality
> implemented once in the standard library.

Yep, that part I'm convinced of the need for - hence runpy.run_path.

It's whether the immediate demand is there to justify tinkering with the
existing tools in the standard library that I'm not sure about
(particularly when there is a risk of altering behaviour in some corner
cases).

> For what its worth, I think Ned Batchelder did the most thorough job of
> implementing this in the latest version of coverage:
> 
>   http://bitbucket.org/ned/coveragepy/src/tip/coverage/execfile.py

That's actually fairly similar to what run_path will do in the simple
script case (zipfile and directory execution is a fair bit messier in
practice, but based on a similar concept in principle).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------