Paul Moore writes:
> 2008/12/23 <ro...@gnu.org>:
> > What is wanted is a uniform way get and describe a file location
> > from a code object that takes into account the file might be a member
> > of an archive.
>
> But a code object may not have come from a file.
Right. That's why I mentioned for example "eval" and "exec" that you
cite below. So remove the "file" in what is cited above. Replace with:
"a unform way to get information (not necessarily just the source
text) about the location/origin of code from a code object.
> Ignoring the
> interactive prompt (not because it's unimportant, just because people
> have a tendency to assume it's the only special case :-)) you need to
> consider code loaded via a PEP302 importer from (say) a sqlite
> database, or code created using compile(), or possibly even more
> esoteric means.
>
> So I'm not sure your request is clearly specified.
Is the above any more clear?
>
> > Are there even guidelines for saying what string goes into a code
> > object's co_filename? Clearly it should be related to the source code
> > that generated the code, and there are various conventions that seem
> > to exist when the code comes from an "eval" or an "exec".
>
> I'm not aware of guidelines - the documentation for compile() says
> "The filename argument should give the file from which the code was
> read; pass some recognizable value if it wasn't read from a file
> ('<string>' is commonly used)" which is pretty non-commital.
>
> > But empirically it seems as though there's some variation. It could be
> > an absolute file or a file with no root directory specified. (But is
> > it possible to have things like "." and ".."?). And in the case of a
> > member of a package what happens? Should it be just the member without
> > the package? Or should it include the package name like
> > /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tracer-0.1.0-py2.5.egg/tracer.py ?
> >
> > Or be unspecified? If left unspecified as I gather it is now, it makes
> > it more important to have some sort of common routine to be able to
> > pick out the archive part in a filesystem from the member name inside
> > the archive.
>
> I think you need to be clear on *why* you want to know this
> information. Once it's clear what you're trying to achieve, it will be
> easier to say what the options are.
This is what I wrote originally (slightly modified):
A use case here I am thinking of here is in a stack trace or a
debugger, or a tool which wants to show in great detail, information
from a code object obtained possibly via a frame object.
I find it kind of sucky to see in a traceback: "<string>" as opposed
to the text (or prefix of the text) of the actual string that was
passed. Or something that has been referred to as a "pseudo-file" like
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tracer-0.1.0-py2.5.egg/foo/bar.py
when it is really member foo/bar.py of zipped egg
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tracer-0.1.0-py2.5.egg.
(As a separate issue, it seems that zipimporter file locations inside
setuptools may have a problem.)
Inside a debugger or an IDE, it is conceivable a person might want
loader, and module information, and if the code is part of an archive
file, then member information. (If part of an eval string then, the
eval string.)
>
> It sounds like you're trying to propose a stronger convention, to be
> enforced in the future.
Well, I wasn't sure if there was one. But I gather from what you write,
there isn't. :-)
Yes, I would suggest a stronger convention. Or a more up-front
statement that none is desired/forthcoming.
> (At least, your suggestion of producing stack
> traces implies that you want stack trace code not to have to deal with
> the current situation). When PEP 302 was being developed, we were
> looking at similar issues. That's why I pointed you at get_source() -
> it was the best we could do with all the various conflicting
> requirements, and the fact that it's optional is because we had to
> cater for cases where there simply wasn't a meaningful answer.
> Frankly, backward compatibility requirements kill a lot of the options
> here.
>
> Maybe what you want is a *pair* of linked conventions:
>
> - co_filename (or a replacement) returns a (notionally opaque, but
> in practice a filename for file-based cases) token representing "the
> file or other object the code came from"
This would be nice.
> - xxx.get_source_code(token) is a function (I don't know where,
> xxx is a placeholder for some "suitable" module) which, given such a
> token, returns the source, or None if there's no viable concept of
> "the source".
There always is a viable concept of a source. It's whatever was done
to get the code. For example, if it was via an eval then the source
was the eval function and a string, same for exec. If it's via
database access, well that then and some summary info about what's
known about that.
>
> Or maybe you want a (possibly separate) attribute of a code object,
> which holds a string containing a human-readable (but quite possibly
> not machine-parseable) value representing the "place the code came
> from" - co_filename is essentially this at the moment, and maybe your
> complaint is merely that you don't find its contents sufficiently
> human-readable in the case of the zipimport module (in which case you
> might want to search some of the archives for the discussions on the
> constraints imposed on zipimport, because objects on sys.path must be
> strings and cannot be arbitrary objects...)
There are two problems. One is displaying location information in an
unambiguous way -- the pseudo-file above is ambiguous and so is
<string> since there's no guarentee that OS's make to not name a file
that. The second problem is programmatically getting information such
as a debugger or an IDE might do so that the information can be
conveyed back to a user who might want to inspect surrounding source
code or modules.
>
> I'm sorry if this is a little rambling. I can appreciate that there's
> some sort of issue that you see here, but I don't yet see any
> practical way of changing things that would help. And as always,
> there's backward compatibility to consider - existing code isn't going
> to change, so new code has to be prepared to handle that.
>
> I hope this is of some help,
Yes, thanks. At least I now have a clearer idea of the state of
where things stand.
> Paul.
>
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