[Python-Dev] Zipping the standard library.

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org> wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestions (Antoine too), but that's not really the topic I
> want to discuss here (but if you guys move to Google I'll happily discuss
> all the stuff we have to deal with.) The questions is really whether Python
> wants to actually support zipped stdlibs or not.

I do want to support it; that's why we put the facilities you found
there in the first place. Unfortunately nobody actually did the
necessary second step of trying to bundle the stdlib and trying to
make the tests pass. So I think it would be great if we addressed the
issues you found, or at least started prioritizing them.

I'm not sure if you're saying that you're hitting the 2 GB limit *with
just the stdlib* in a zipfile, or if you're hitting this after you've
added a bunch of Google code to it as well. I'm also not sure that
it's worth the effort to make *all* the tests in the stdlib pass --
some tests may just be testing filesystem things that make no sense
when the stdlib is in a zipfile. I see you frowning already about my
lax attitide... So let me add that all non-test code should definitely
work, and quite possible the only way to ensure that this is the case
is to make all the tests pass. The issue with needing os.py outside
the zipfile is a good thing to try to fix. The importlib and zipfile
issues don't worry me particularly, but depending on your answer about
the 2 GB limit I might get more concerned.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)