Paul Moore added the comment: On 30 June 2015 at 23:30, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote: > I don't remember the details of why this feature was added, > but can imagine that it was supposed to enable installation > of new importers via .pth files.
I don't know for certain if this feature was already available when importers were added, but there was certainly never any thought of adding importers via .pth files when we designed them. We expected importers to be added to sys.(meta_)path by explicit code run at application startup, before the imports that needed it. I'm glad to hear that setuptools is reconsidering its import priority hacking. And I also have never seen any use of executable code in .pth files that wasn't at best a dubious hack. But removing the feature (as opposed to getting packages to stop misusing the feature) is too much of a compatibility break. It might be worth putting together a documentation patch that expands what the docs say about the feature. Pointing out that it's easy to misuse, and advising caution, might be a reasonable thing to do. (Adding an example of a reasonable use of the feature would be even better, but that would require thinking of a reasonable use!!! :-)) ---------- nosy: +paul.moore _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue24534> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com