[Distutils] python version information in .egg-info directory name

[Anthony Baxter]

On Saturday 22 July 2006 04:51, Andrew Straw wrote:
> The problem he's trying to solve is that the new Debian Python
> policy allows a single directory tree of .py files (not the .pyc
> and .pyo files) to serve all installed Python versions. The .pyc
> files get placed in a separate tree which is, obviously, versioned.

Debian's been asking for this for a while now. The problem is that 
serving pyc/pyo files from a different location requires some ugly 
hacking on import.c

As far as I'm aware, no-one has done that work. Or if they have, they 
haven't fed the changes back into Python that I've seen. 

As Phillip points out, this is a recipe for all sorts of pain. This is 
one of the issues I hope will be made better in Python 3 - until 
then, I'm very doubtful that the necessary work to change import to 
handle this in a sane and backwards compatible way will be done.

Some small example - the __file__ attribute of a module might suddenly 
be different depending on whether you load from a pyc or a py file. 
Plenty of code uses this to load resources from the package directory 
where the code lives. There's also changes needed to make sure that 
any files that are compiled (or recompiled) to pyc get the pyc files 
written to the new, different, location.

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.