At 06:43 PM 4/21/2006 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote: >They might need to be available outside "Python". Two use cases: > >1. The application embeds an sqlite database. Even though it > knows how to get at the data, it can't use it, because the > sqlite3 library won't accept > .../foo-1.0.egg/resources/the_data > (or some such) as a database name, if foo-1.0.egg is a ZIP file. > > If the installed application was a set of files, that would work. > >2. The application embeds an SGML DTD (say, HTML). In order to > perform validation, it invokes nsgmls on the host system. > It cannot pass the SGML catalog to nsgmls (using the -C option) > since you can't refer to DTD files inside ZIP files inside > an SGML catalog. > > If this was a bunch of installed files, it would work. > >3. The application includes an SSL certificate. It can't pass it > to socket.ssl, since OpenSSL expects a host system file name, > not a fragment of a zip file. > > If this was installed as files, it would work.
In all of these cases, the applications could use pkg_resources.resource_filename(), which returns a true OS filename, even for files inside of .zip files. Of course, it does this by extracting to a cache directory in such cases, and is only suitable for read-only access. But it works fine for such cases as these. Passing a resource directory name results in an operating system directory name being returned as well, with all the contents (recursively extracted) therein. If the application is *not* in a zip file, then resource_filename() simply returns the obvious results by __file__ manipulation, so the author need not concern him or herself with this in code. They just use resource_string() or resource_string() wherever possible, and resort to resource_filename() when working with tools such as the above, that cannot handle anything but files. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
