[Python-Dev] request for review: patch 1446489 (zip64 extensions in zipfile)

Tue Jun 13 10:08:54 CEST 2006

Hi,
As I mentioned earlier I'd like to get patch 1446489 (support for 
zip64 extensions in the zipfile module) in python 2.5. The patch 
should be perfectly safe, it comes with unittests and a documentation 
update. I'm also using this version of zipfile in (closed-source) 
projects to handle huge zipfiles.
There are two backward incompatbile changes, both minor. First of all 
ZipInfo will lose the file_offset attribute because calculating it 
when opening a zipfile is very expensive (it basically requires a 
full scan of the zipfile). This should be harmless, I couldn't come 
up with a usecase other then reimplementing the read method outside 
of zipfile. The second incompatibility is that zipfile will try to 
raise an error when the zipfile gets to large, instead of reducing 
the zipfile to garbage as the current revision of zipfile does.
The major changes in the patch are: support for ZIP64 extensions 
which make it possible to handle zipfiles that are larger than 2 
GByte in size and a significant speed-up of zipfile opening when 
dealing with zipfiles that contain a large amount of files. These are 
in one patch because large zipfiles support isn't very useful when 
opening the zipfile takes more than 30 seconds.
Ronald