[Python-Dev] #12982: Should -O be required to read .pyo files? (original) (raw)
Alexandre Zani alexandre.zani at gmail.com
Tue Jun 12 20:49:04 CEST 2012
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On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
Terry Reedy wrote:
http://bugs.python.org/issue12982 Currently, cpython requires the -O flag to read .pyo files as well as the write them. This is a nuisance to people who receive them from others, without the source. The originator of the issue quotes the following from the doc (without giving the location). "It is possible to have a file called spam.pyc (or spam.pyo when -O is used) without a file spam.py for the same module. This can be used to distribute a library of Python code in a form that is moderately hard to reverse engineer." There is no warning that .pyo files are viral, in a sense. The user has to use -O, which is a) a nuisance to remember if he has multiple scripts and some need it and some not, and b) makes his own .py files used with .pyo imports cached as .pyo, without docstrings, like it or not. Currently, the easiest workaround is to rename .pyo to .pyc and all seems to work fine, even with a mixture of true .pyc and renamed .pyo files. (The same is true with the -O flag and no renaming.) This suggests that there is no current reason for the restriction in that the execution of bytecode is not affected by the -O flag. (Another workaround might be a custom importer -- but this is not trivial, apparently.) So is the import restriction either an accident or obsolete holdover? If so, can removing it be treated as a bugfix and put into current releases, or should it be treated as an enhancement only for a future release? Or is the restriction an intentional reservation of the possibility of making execution depend on the flag? Which would mean that the restriction should be kept and only the doc changed? I have no history so cannot say what was supposed to happen, but my $0.02 would be that if -O is not specified then we should try to read .pyc, then .pyo, and finally .py. In other words, I vote for -O being a write flag, not a read flag.
What if I change .py?
Ethan
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