[Python-Dev] __file__

[Glenn Linderman]

On approximately 2/26/2010 5:13 PM, came the following characters from 
the keyboard of Brett Cannon:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 15:35, Glenn Linderman <v+python at g.nevcal.com 
> <mailto:v%2Bpython at g.nevcal.com>> wrote:
>
>     On approximately 2/26/2010 2:55 PM, came the following characters
>     from the keyboard of Brett Cannon:
>
>
>            Maybe Greg's and my response to the mention of dropping
>         this feature
>            is too strong -- after all we're both dinosaurs. And maybe the
>            developers who want the feature can write their own loader.
>
>
>         We could also provide if necessary.
>
>
>     So if the implementation stores .pyc by default in a
>     version-specific place, then it seems there are only two things
>     needed to make a python byte-code only distribution...
>
>     1) rename all the .pyc to .py
>     2) packaging
>
>     When a .pyc is renamed to .py, Python (3.1 at least) recognizes
>     and uses it... I assume by design, rather than accident, but I
>     don't know the history.
>
>
> This does not work for me (nor should it):
>
> > touch temp.py
> > python3 -c "import temp"
> > rm temp.py
> > mv temp.pyc temp.py
> > python3 -c "import temp"
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "temp.py", line 2
> SyntaxError: Non-UTF-8 code starting with '\x95' in file temp.py on 
> line 2, but no encoding declared; see 
> http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details
>
> -Brett

I'll admit to not doing exhaustive testing, but I'll not admit to not 
doing any testing... because it was sort of a wild idea.  Someone else 
called it "kooky", which is fair.

What I did was:

python -m test
ren test.pyc foo.py
foo.py

and it worked.  Then I posted, knowing that I'd also tested, the other 
day, several .py into a .zip named .py, and once that worked, then I 
changed to putting all .pyc into the .zip named .py and that worked 
too... including imports of the several modules from the 
"__main__.pyc".  Of course, all those were still named .pyc inside the 
.zip named .py.

So I'm not sure what the difference is...  .pyc as .py works from the 
command line, but not from import?  Some specialty because of using -c ?

I'd guess the technique could be made to work, probably not require 
extensive changes, if Python developers wanted to make it work.  I think 
it could be efficient and that same someone that called it "kooky" 
admitted it would solve their use case, at least.

I'm not sure why what you did is different than what I did, nor why you 
state without justification that it shouldn't work... I might be able to 
figure out the former if I spend enough time with the documentation, if 
it is documented, but I'm too new to Python to understand the latter 
without explanation.  Could you supply at least the latter explanation?  
I'd like to understand the issue here, whether or not the "kooky" idea 
goes forward.

-- 
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
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