Re: Loading Resources From a Python Module/Package

On 30 January 2015 at 23:37, Donald Stufft <[email protected]> wrote:
> A. What do people think about pkgutil.get_data_filename and
>    Loader.get_data_filename?

Sounds reasonable. It's a relatively rare, but useful use case. One
possible issue, though, would people assume that if they get a
filename it'd be writeable? For the filesystem loader it would be, but
that would break subtly (writes work but would get discarded) for
loaders that don't have a native get_data_filename.

Related question - how would the temp files be cleaned up? At exit?

> B. What do people think about modifying Loader.get_data so it can support
>    relative filenames instead of the calling code needing to handle that?

I'd have to think about that one, but in principle it seems reasonable.

While we're extending the loaders, a far more commonly requested
feature would be to list available data files. At the moment, code can
only load data from known paths, which is not ideal. While it's
unrelated to the original proposal, it makes sense if we're changing
the spec of loaders to do it in one go, rather than having multiple
iterations.

Paul