[Python-Dev] Fwd: zipimport

[Brett Cannon]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 5:04 PM Rose Ames <rose at happyspork.com> wrote:

> At pycon I talked with a few people about bugs.python.org/issue19699.
> The consensus seemed to be that zipimport wants a lot of work, possibly
> a rewrite.
>
> I'll have some time to work on this over the next couple of months, but
> I want to be working on the right thing.  Could the people who were
> involved in that conversation remind me of their concerns with
> zipimport?  What exactly would the goal of a rewrite be?
>

I believe the participants consisted of Thomas Wouters, Greg Smith, Eric
Snow, Nick Coghlan, and myself. In the end I think the general consensus
for long-term maintenance was to write the minimal amount of code required
that could read zip files and then write all of the import-related code on
top of that. Basically the idea of freezing zipfile seemed messy since it
has a ton of dependencies and baggage that simply isn't needed to replace
zipimport.

I vaguely remember people suggesting writing the minimal zip reading code
in C but I can't remember why since we have I/O access in importlib through
_io and thus it's really just the pulling apart of the zip file to get at
the files to import and thus should be doable in pure Python.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20150602/ff7dee96/attachment.html>