[Python-Dev] Keyword meanings [was: Accept just PEP-0426] (original) (raw)

PJ Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Fri Dec 7 06:49:27 CET 2012

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:58 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Daniel Holth <dholth gmail.com> writes:

The wheel implementation makes sure all the metadata (the .dist-info directory) is at the end of the .zip archive. It's possible to read the metadata with a single HTTP partial request for the end of the archive without downloading the entire archive. Sounds good, but can you point to any example code which does this? As I understand it, for .zip files you have to read the last part of the file to get a pointer to the directory, then read that to find where each file in the archive is, then seek to a specific position to read the file contents.

ISTR that this is especially true for zipimport: I think it depends on a zipfile signature being present at the end of the file.

Certainly, the standard for .exe and shell wrappers for zipfiles is to place them at the beginning of the file, rather than the end.

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