Copy of #2751. Having discussed this with Nick a bit more over email, he suggested that package execution could actually be properly supported by looking for a __main__ module inside the package and executing it instead. This is consistent with the way .zip archives are executed and would neatly resolve this problem. I attached a simple patch implementing this. Nick also said that fixing this might be considered a new feature and might have to wait until 2.7. Given that this worked on Python 2.5, albeit unintentionally, I'd argue that this is closer to a fix of a somewhat buggy Python 2.5 feature than a new feature in 2.6.
Added revised version of patch with test cases and documentation updates, as well as fixing a potential recursion issue with pathological packages where __main__ was also a package)
Missed the window for 2.6/3.0. Guido agreed on python-dev that it counts as a new feature, so it was definitely out for the already-released 2.6, and also wasn't really an option for the release candidate phase of 3.0. Assigning to myself for 2.7/3.1 - I'll put it in once the 3.0 maintenance branch has been cut (so I can update both 2.x and 3.x at the same time. For 2.6 and 3.0 though, short run scripts such as "python -m jcc.main" are going to be the order of the day.
