[Python-Dev] Generally boared by installation (Re: Setting project home path the best way)

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Kristján Valur Jónsson <
kristjan at ccpgames.com> wrote:

>  I’m intrigued.  I thought this was merely so that one could do****
>
> python –m mypackage.mysubpackage****
>
> Can you refer me to the rationale and discussion about this feature?
>

It was part of a fairly long progression in changes to the command line
execution support :)

Top level package execution with -m came first in 2.4, arbitrary package
execution for -m arrived in 2.5 (along with the runpy module), directory
and zipfile execution (by supplying a valid sys.path entry as the "script"
command line argument) was added in 2.6/3.0, and finally officially
supported package execution via -m only arrived in 2.7 and 3.1 (a broken
version of the last accidentally existed in 2.5, but that was just a
mistake that arose when merging the import emulations in runpy and pkgutil,
and had a side effect that violated at least one of the import system
invariants).

In the specific case of directory and zipfile execution, discussion
happened on the tracker: http://bugs.python.org/issue1739468

It was never brought up on python-dev because Guido was participating
directly in the tracker discussion. Unfortunately, we then also forgot to
mention it in the original version of the 2.6 What's New doc, so the vast
majority of people missed the addition :(

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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