[Python-Dev] Zipping the standard library.

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 14:49:24 -0800
Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org> wrote:
> Also, depending on what else you
> want to put in the zipfile, you may have to be aware of zipimports limited
> implementation of zipfiles that involve various 32k-filecount and
> 2Gb-filesize limits. (And in case you're wondering, yes, we are doing this
> with Python 2.7 at Google to save space. And yes, hitting the 2Gb limit is
> quite possible for us.)

Have you investigated filesystems with built-in compression? :)

> Also, at that point the question becomes if we need a
> transparent interface for opening module sourcefiles or arbitrary files
> living in packages, that could grab things out of zipfiles (like setuptools
> has in... one of the modules) -- or other archives of course.

You mean pkg_resources I suppose. The problem is this kind of API is a
PITA to use compared to the simple and obvious
   open(<some formula involving __file__>)

Regards

Antoine.