On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Bradley M. Froehle <brad.froe...@gmail.com> wrote: > I implemented just such a path hook ---- zipimporter plus the magic required > for C extensions --- as a challenge to myself to learn more about the Python > import mechanisms. > > See https://github.com/bfroehle/pydzipimport.
FYI, there appears to be a bug for Windows with packages: you're using '/__init__' in a couple places that should actually be os.sep+'__init__'. This does seem like a good way to address the issue, for those rare situations where this would be a good idea. The zipped .egg approach was originally intended for user-managed plugin directories for certain types of extensible platforms, where "download a file and stick it in the plugins directory" is a low-effort way to install plugins, without having to build a lot of specialized install capability. As Jim has pointed out, though, this doesn't generalize well to a full-blown packaging system. Technically, you can blame Bob Ippolito for this, since he's the one who talked me into using eggs to install Python libraries in general, not just as a plugin packaging mechanism. ;-) That being said, *unpacked* egg, er, wheels, are still a great way to meet all of the "different apps needing different versions" use cases (without needing one venv per app), and nowadays the existence of automated installer tools means that using one to install a plugin for a low-tech plugin system is not a big deal, as long as that tool supports the simple unpacked wheel scenario. So I wholeheartedly support some kind of mount/unmount or "require"-type mechanism for finding plugins. pkg_resources even has an API for handling simple dynamic plugin dependency resolution scenarios: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PkgResources#locating-plugins It'd be a good idea if distlib provides a similar feature, or at least the APIs upon which apps or frameworks can implement such features. (Historical note for those who weren't around back then: easy_install wasn't even an *idea* until well after eggs were created; the original idea was just that people would build plugins and libraries as eggs and manually drop them in directories, where a plugin support library would discover them and add them to sys.path as needed. And Bob and I also considered a sort of "update site" mechanism ala Eclipse, with a library to let apps fetch plugins. But as soon as eggs existed and PyPI allowed uploads, it was kind of an obvious follow-up to make an installation tool as a kind of "technology demonstration".... which promptly became a monster. The full story with all its twists and turns can also be found here: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-April/064145.html ) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
