The long-term goal is to deprecate imp.find_module() in favour of this
API, but it will take some time as some APIs explicitly return/use what
imp.find_module() returns.

importlib.abc.FileLoader.load_module()/get_filename() and
importlib.machinery.ExtensionFileLoader.load_module() have their
single argument be optional as the loader's constructor has all the
ncessary information.

This allows for the deprecation of
imp.load_source()/load_compile()/load_package().

importlib.machinery that provide the suffix details for import.
The attributes were not put on imp so as to compartmentalize
everything importlib needs for setting up imports in
importlib.machinery.

This also led to an indirect deprecation of inspect.getmoduleinfo() as
it directly returned imp.get_suffix's returned tuple which no longer
makes sense.

importlib.util.module_for_loader also will set __loader__ along with
__package__. This is in conjunction to a forthcoming update to PEP 302
which will make these two attributes required for loaders to set.

This time also recreating the Python/importlib.h file to make
make happy. See the ticket for details.

the buildbots to fail.

importlib.machinery.(FileFinder, SourceFileLoader,
_SourcelessFileLoader, ExtensionFileLoader).

This exposes all of importlib's mechanisms that will become public on
the sys module.

Issue #14043: Speed up importlib's _FileFinder by at least 8x, and add a new importlib.invalidate_caches() function.

importlib is now often faster than imp.find_module() at finding modules.

code, to avoid timestamp collisions (especially on filesystems with a low
timestamp resolution) when checking for freshness of the bytecode.

This required moving the class from importlib/abc.py into
importlib/_bootstrap.py and jiggering some code to work better with the class.
This included changing how the file finder worked to better meet import
semantics. This also led to fixing importlib to handle the empty string from
sys.path as import currently does (and making me wish we didn't support that
instead just required people to insert '.' instead to represent cwd).

It also required making the new set_data abstractmethod create
any needed subdirectories implicitly thanks to __pycache__ (it was either this
or grow the SourceLoader ABC to gain an 'exists' method and either a mkdir
method or have set_data with no data arg mean to create a directory).

Lastly, as an optimization the file loaders cache the file path where the
finder found something to use for loading (this is thanks to having a
sourceless loader separate from the source loader to simplify the code and
cut out stat calls).
Unfortunately test_runpy assumed a loader would always work for a module, even
if you changed from underneath it what it was expected to work with. By simply
dropping the previous loader in test_runpy so the proper loader can be returned
by the finder fixed the failure.

At this point importlib deviates from import on two points:

1. The exception raised when trying to import a file is different (import does
an explicit file check to print a special message, importlib just says the path
cannot be imported as if it was just some module name).

2. the co_filename on a code object is not being set to where bytecode was
actually loaded from instead of where the marshalled code object originally
came from (a solution for this has already been agreed upon on python-dev but has
not been implemented yet; issue8611).

Required updating code relying on other modules to switch to _bootstrap's
unique module requirements. This led to the realization that
get_code was being too liberal in its exception catching when calling set_data
by blindly grabbing IOError. Shifted the responsibility of safely ignoring
writes to a read-only path to set_data.

Importlib is still not relying on SourceLoader yet; requires creating a
SourcelessLoader and updating the source finder.

SourceLoader is a simplification of both PyLoader and PyPycLoader. If one only
wants to use source, then they need to only implement get_data and
get_filename. To also use bytecode -- sourceless loading is not supported --
then two abstract methods -- path_mtime and set_data -- need to be implemented.
Compared to PyLoader and PyPycLoader, there are less abstract methods
introduced and bytecode files become an optimization controlled by the ABC and
hidden from the user (this need came about as PEP 3147 showed that not treating
bytecode as an optimization can cause problems for compatibility).

PyLoader is deprecated in favor of SourceLoader. To be compatible from Python
3.1 onwards, a subclass need only use simple methods for source_path and
is_package. Otherwise conditional subclassing based on whether Python 3.1 or
Python 3.2 is being is the only change. The documentation and docstring for
PyLoader explain what is exactly needed.

PyPycLoader is deprecated also in favor of SourceLoader. Because PEP 3147
shifted bytecode path details so much, there is no foolproof way to provide
backwards-compatibility with SourceLoader. Because of this the class is simply
deprecated and users should move to SourceLoader (and optionally PyLoader for
Python 3.1). This does lead to a loss of support for sourceless loading
unfortunately.

At some point before Python 3.2 is released, SourceLoader will be moved over to
importlib._bootstrap so that the core code of importlib relies on the new code
instead of the old PyPycLoader code. This commit is being done now so that
there is no issue in having the API in Python 3.1a1.

Closes issue 8667. Thanks Ashley Sands for the patch.

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/branches/py3k

........
  r77479 | brett.cannon | 2010-01-13 11:21:00 -0800 (Wed, 13 Jan 2010) | 1 line

  Fix the wrong numbering of a PEP.
........

Make the wdocs for importlib.abc.ExecutionLoader to be weaker in terms of what is needed to execute a module.

importlib.abc.ExecutionLoader. PyLoader now inherits from this ABC instead of
InspectLoader directly. Both PyLoader and PyPycLoader provide concrete
implementations of get_filename in terms of source_path and bytecode_path.