[Import-SIG] Import engine PEP up on python.org

[Brett Cannon]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 00:12, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
[SNIP]
>
> *Brett: do you have a public Hg repo for working on the importlib
> bootstrapping effort?
>

Yep. If you look at http://hg.python.org/sandbox/bcannon/ you will
find a bootstrap_importlib branch. It's been about two months since I
had a chance to work on it, so it needs to be merged with default.

In the branch you will find a FAILING file which contains the test
names of tests that are failing and a comment as to why (one I have
not fully dived into and the test_pydoc failure can be fixed once
ImportError has an attribute specifying what module it couldn't
import). You can pass the file to regrtest to easily test the known
failures.

Otherwise comments on what is left to be done can be found in
Python/pythonrun.c (although the comment about zipimport is
out-of-date; I fixed that in rev 72162:b4edd0d9fce6). At this point
all that is left (I think) is dealing with:

1. _io wanting to import os at module initialization time (I suspect
it can just be a post-importlib call in pythonrun.c to setup)
2. exposing the APIs that are added in importlib.__init__ (case_ok
from import.c and reading/writing longs from marshal; need to add a
comment to pythonrun.c about this)
3. adding a build rule to freeze importlib for importation (thinking
it might not be best to do it automatically to make it easier to fix
bugs using a known, good version of importlib, but that's still up in
the air)

IOW nothing crazy or insurmountable. I'm still hoping to be damn close
by PyCon, but who knows. I have just moved to Toronto so at least my
life should be stabilizing, but I am starting on a new team so I don't
know what kind of ramp-up that will entail. I have absolutely no
issues with receiving help on this; importlib if people want to help
(and the C code sans build stuff to get the freezing working shouldn't
be nuts, so people like Eric can help if they want =).

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