[Python-Dev] __file__

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Feb 27, 2010, at 9:38 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> I do like the idea of pulling .pyc only imports out into a separate
> importer, but would go so far as to suggest keeping them as a command
> line option rather than as a separately distributed module.

One advantage of doing this as a separately distributed module is that it can have its own ecosystem and momentum.  Most projects that want this sort of bundling or packaging really want to be shipped with something like py2exe, and I think the folks who want such facilities would be better served by a nice project website for "python sealer" or "python bundler" rather than obscure directions for triggering the behavior via options or configuration.

Making bytecode loading a feature of interpreter startup, whether it's a config file, a command-line option or an environment variable, is not a great idea.  For folks that want to ship a self-contained application, any of these would require an additional customization step, where they need to somehow tell their bundled interpreter to load bytecode.  For people trying to ship a self-contained and tamper-unfriendly (since even "tamper-resistant" would be overstating things) library to relatively non-technical programmers, it opens the door to a whole universe of confusion and FAQs about why the code didn't load.

However bytecode-only code loading is facilitated, it should be possible to bootstrap from a vanilla python interpreter running normally, as you may not know you need to load a bytecode-only package at startup.  In the stand-alone case there are already plenty of options, and in the library case, shipping a zip file should be fine, since the __init__.py of your package should be plain-text and also able to trigger the activation of the bytecode-only importer.

There are already so many ways to ship bytecode already, it doesn't seem too important to support in this one particular configuration (files in a directory, compiled by just importing them, in the same place as ".py" files).  The real problem is providing a seamless transition path for *build* processes, not the Python code itself.  Do any of the folks who are currently using this feature have a good idea as to how your build and distribute scripts might easily be updated, perhaps by a 2to3 fixer?
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