At 02:11 PM 9/27/2006 -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:
>But it has been suggested here that the import machinery be rewritten in
>Python. Now I have never touched the import code since it has always had
>the reputation of being less than friendly to work with. I am asking for
>opinions from people who have worked with the import machinery before if
>it is so bad that it is worth trying to re-implement the import semantics
>in pure Python or if in the name of time to just work with the C
>code. Basically I will end up breaking up built-in, .py, .pyc, and
>extension modules into individual importers and then have a chaining class
>to act as a combined .pyc/.py combination importer (this will also make
>writing out to .pyc files an optional step of the .py import).
The problem you would run into here would be supporting zip imports. It
would probably be more useful to have a mapping of file types to "format
handlers", because then a filesystem importer or zip importer would then be
able to work with any .py/.pyc/.pyo/whatever formats, along with any new
ones that are invented, without reinventing the wheel.
Thus, whether it's file import, zip import, web import, or whatever, the
same handlers would be reusable, and when people invent new extensions like
.ptl, .kid, etc., they can just register format handlers instead.
Format handlers could of course be based on the PEP 302 protocol, and
simply accept a "parent importer" with a get_data() method. So, let's say
you have a PyImporter:
class PyImporter:
def __init__(self, parent_importer):
self.parent = parent_importer
def find_module(self, fullname):
path = fullname.split('.')[-1]+'.py'
try:
source = self.parent.get_data(path)
except IOError:
return None
else:
return PySourceLoader(source)
See what I mean? The importers and loaders thus don't have to do direct
filesystem operations.
Of course, to fully support .pyc timestamp checking and writeback, you'd
need some sort of "stat" or "getmtime" feature on the parent importer, as
well as perhaps an optional "save_data" method. These would be extensions
to PEP 302, but welcome ones.
Anyway, based on my previous work with pkg_resource, pkgutil, zipimport,
import.c, etc. I would say this is how I'd want to structure a
reimplementation of the core system. And if it were for Py3K, I'd probably
treat sys.path and all the import hooks associated with it as a single
meta-importer on sys.meta_path -- listed after a meta-importer for handling
frozen and built-in modules. (I.e., the meta-importer that uses sys.path
and its path hooks would be last on sys.meta_path.)
In other words, sys.meta_path is really the only critical import hook from
the raw interpreter's point of view. sys.path, however, (along with
sys.path_hooks and sys.path_importer_cache) is critical from the
perspective of users, applications, etc., as there has to be some way to
get things onto Python's path in the first place.
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