Glenn Linderman wrote: > On approximately 2/2/2010 7:05 PM, came the following characters from > the keyboard of Guido van Rossum: >> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 5:41 PM, Glenn >> Linderman<v+pyt...@g.nevcal.com> wrote: >>> Agreed. But in reading that, it somehow triggered a question: >>> does zipimport only work for zipfiles, or does it work for any >>> archive format that Python stdlib knows how to decode? And if >>> only the former, why are they so special? >>> >> The former. >> >> They are special because (unlike e.g. tar files) you can read the >> table of contents of a zipfile without parsing the entire file. > > They are not unique in this... most archive formats except tar have a > directory. But that is likely a good reason not to support tar for > this purpose, especially since tar usually comes found as .tar.Z or > .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 etc. and would require two passes before the data > could be found at all.
It's also because nobody has done the work to hook up any additional archive formats (as zipimport needs to work for importing the standard library itself, it isn't quite as simple as just importing an extra module to do the manipulation. Extending the test suite to cover a new archive format would require some work as well). Given that zip files already work and are almost universal, I figure folks have just opted to use that and then found other things to do with their coding time :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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
