[Python-Dev] New and Improved Import Hooks (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik@pythonware.com
Wed, 4 Dec 2002 23:42:14 +0100

Just van Rossum wrote:

(I'd still like to see more examples of code breaking if a sys.path item isn't a string. Not that I don't believe it, but I'd like to get an impression of the severeness of the damage.)

From the ImageFont module in PIL 1.1.3:

def load_path(filename): "Load a font file, searching along the Python path." for dir in sys.path: try: return load(os.path.join(dir, filename)) except IOError: pass raise IOError, "cannot find font file"

(this is fixed in 1.1.4)

FWIW, I've done lots of stuff that scans sys.path directories for various purposes. It would probably be a good idea to use a string subclass for the zip importer, but I don't think we need to make stringness an absolute requirement.

Let's make it really easy to use zip archives, and reasonably easy to use other custom importers.