[Distutils] zip imports ftw

[Daniel Holth]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 15:33 -0400, Daniel Holth wrote:
>> It is because the file has a controversial coding style, with up to 25
>> lines of whitespace between classes, and includes functionality for
>> eggs and some other stuff that was unwanted on top of the resources
>> stuff that partly made its way into pkgutil.
>
> I think maybe there's also a latent notion floating around that "a
> resource (aka non-Python files) shouldn't be addressable within Python
> packages" aka. "Python should only make it easy to address Python files
> in Python packages, but no other kind of file".  I'm not sure I've ever
> seen any of the core dev team express this opinion, but I've seen it
> floating around elsewhere.

I think we should talk about something else.

Let's talk about how to replace the stdlib's implementation of the
packaging API with another implementation, like import hooks. How
would that work? Should we define a strict API/implementation
separation by using the amazing apipkg, and then let Python choose the
actual implementation based on an environment variable/site.py/.pth
file with 'import; do something'; or perhaps a configure.zcml in
site-packages with zope.interface?