A few months ago, 2.6 & 3.0 gained the ability to execute zipfiles and directories containing a __main__.py file (see [1] for details).
The idea is that a whole application can be bundled into a zipfile containing a __main__.py module in its root directory, and then passed directly to the interpreter for execution, with the zipfile being inserted as the first entry on sys.path to allow easy access to the rest of the application code. It is inspired by Java's JAR option, but not needing an explicit interpreter option makes it more shebang friendly on *nix systems (it can also be mapped more easily to the existing Python file type handling on Windows). The ability to also execute directories containing a __main__.py was something of a side effect of the implementation technique, but was also considered valuable as it makes it much easier to develop such bundled applications (using a directory most of the time, and then bundling into a single zipfile prior to release). The part I'm struggling with now is where to document the way this feature works. Currently, the only real documentation we have of the command line invocation is in section 2.1 of the tutorial, and the idea of packaging whole applications as zipfiles seems far too esoteric to be covering it there. It doesn't really seem to fit in section 6 (covering modules and packages) either. Do we need a new appendix to the tutorial which goes into detail about the CPython interpreter's command line options, environment variables and details on what can be executed? Cheers, Nick. [1] http://bugs.python.org/issue1739468 -- Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.boredomandlaziness.org _______________________________________________ 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
