[Python-Dev] 3rd party extensions hot-fixing the stdlib (setuptools in the stdlib) (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Apr 20 06:24:42 CEST 2006

At 10:08 PM 4/19/2006 -0500, Michael Urman wrote:

On 4/19/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote: > People blame setuptools when pydoc doesn't work on packages in zip > files. Rather than refer to some theoretical argument why it's not my > fault and I shouldn't be the one to fix it, I prefer to fix the problem.

So rather than extract the zip at install time (something purely within setuptool's domain), you found modifying pydoc's behavior to be a more compelling story.

Absolutely! It adds a new and useful feature to Python, while extracting the files doesn't. In the meantime, of course, I've told affected users to use the 'always-unzip' option when installing.

Are you aware that zipimport fails on 64-bit systems in Python 2.3, or do you plan to patch over that as well?

Nope. I implemented a workaround instead. :) For a few months now, setuptools generates uncompressed zipfiles for Python 2.3, since it's only compressed zipfiles that give 64-bit zipimport fits. The setuptools docs still claim you have to use Python 2.4 for 64-bit platforms, but I only left that in because there are still plenty of 2.3 compressed eggs floating around.

Do you know of any other Python bugs I should be fixing or working around? :)

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