pex question, might be dumb. Is there a way to get pex to run from files that are not written to ~/.pex? The use case is someone who wants some source files in the pex to be pickleable, and the absolute path to ~/.pex isn’t there when unpickling

you can set PEX_FORCE_LOCAL and PEX_ROOT to force the files in the pex to be written to disk

Hm. it might.

But if their code has that fundamental property, they should mark the pex as not zip safe. In Pants for a

python_binary

that's

zip_safe=False

. The env vars just allow you to do this ad-hoc post facto.

So what is happening is that the code is calling dill.dump_session which tries to dump the _ main _ module symbols but _ main _ ends up being the pex main I think

i believe

zip_safe=False

is the correct way to handle that (to confirm)

zip safe doesn’t fix this fyi. Not saying its an issue with pex, But the pex entrypoint is not the module called _ main _ because that is the pex bootstrapper. Basically the point is that pex is not compatible with dill.dump_session, which is probably okay.

Basically the point is that pex is not compatible with dill.dump_session, which is probably okay.

Makes sense on all counts. The only way to make Pex compatible with this sort of thing would be a new feature where a pex can be marked zip_hostile=True ( 🙂 ) in which case it would have to fully unzip itself (not just user code and wheels like zip_safe=False does) and then re-exec.

Thanks John. I’ll make an issue, and think about working on it 🙂

Excellent. In case you don't get time to work on it, filling out the description with what zip hostile means would be great. Reading the issue as-is cold turkey it would probably be closed with "already implemented - see

pex --help

for

--not-zip-safe

.

Yeah sorry I accidentally submitted it before filling in the description 🤦‍♂️ multiple windows and keyboard mashing