[Python-Dev] Modules that run other scripts

[Robert Kern]

Nick Coghlan wrote:

> For that second part:
> 1. Is it even worth doing at this stage? I'm not sure to what degree the
> new command line flexibility has even been adopted by third party
> application packagers, so I have no idea how large the pool of potential
> users might be. Should I instead wait until we start seeing complaints
> that these tools can't be used with script references that the main
> command line will handle quite happily?

There is a small, but important class of "scripts that run scripts", which are 
mostly all development tools (e.g. coverage, my line_profiler, etc.). Doing this 
correctly in all of the corner cases is reasonably tricky, so I think this is a 
perfect case for having the functionality implemented once in the standard library.

For what its worth, I think Ned Batchelder did the most thorough job of 
implementing this in the latest version of coverage:

   http://bitbucket.org/ned/coveragepy/src/tip/coverage/execfile.py

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco