Simple module installation

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> I was just installing Fnorb and it was as painless an installation as a
> sane person could ask for but I got to thinking...couldn't this be less
> painless? The reason I ask is because I'm thinking of distributing code
> that depends on code that depends on code that depends on Fnorb and I need
> each installation part to be as simple as possible. So this isn't meant to
> pick on Fnorb in particular but to use it as a random sample package with
> binary and Python parts.

Maybe the distutils package that is being developped by the distutils
sig could help.

> ...
> The PYTHONPATH and PATH would be unneccessary if Fnorb used the Windows
> registry. Even so, I think that a Python-managed, portable, text
> file-based registry (like JPython's) would be better than depending upon
> the over-centralized Windows registry.
> ... 
> If we put my idea for a Python-managed registry together with the "-r"
> idea then Fnorb could register itself on Windows or Unix like this:
> 
> python -r register Fnorb /path/to/fnorb

You should take the idea even a bit further and have Python use
the registry per default for all lookups and only have it revert
to PYTHONPATH in case it doesn't find anything appropriate.

A while back I wrote a patch called fastpath that made Python
use a callback (sys.fastback I think it was named) in the import
loader:

A little Python function read a marshalled version of
a module lookup table the first time it was called and then
tried to find the module in that table. If it did find something,
the module loader would stop the search and use the returned
path to the module, otherwise it would do its normal actions.

The nice thing about this callback is that you can modify the
module locator's action without having to modify the Python
source code (well, apart from the few lines needed to add the
callback).

BTW, using the above fastpath trick reduces IO overhead on
startup quite a bit: from a few 100 stat()s to a few 10s for
an average script.

The (old) code is still available for anyone to play with:

	http://starship.skyport.net/~lemburg/fastpath.zip

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg                               Y2000: 259 days left
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