(a generalization of issue #21335)

One way or another, we should be able to record the appropriate path in the resulting data when a module is frozen.  Keeping track of the source location is useful when debugging, especially with tracebacks.  Also see a related conversation on python-dev. [1]

If the original filename for a frozen module is preserved, several possibilities open up:

* the `get_source` method of `importlib._bootstrap.FrozenImporter` could return the original source
* the traceback module could work around the co_filename issue pointed out in #21335
* the filename could be incorporated into the value set for co_filename and __file__
* frozen modules could be optionally reloaded from source

Given that the filename would (likely) be available only through loading the module, it *might* not make sense to store it on the module's spec.  However, it might also make sense to store the filename in a way that it can be exposed during the "find" stage of import.  In that case it would arguably *belong* on the module's spec.

Note that there's a chance that the original filename for a frozen module is no longer available.  That shouldn't be much of a problem, though.


[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-April/134097.html

I'm not sure which kind of use for frozen modules you have in mind.

The freeze tool allows you to replace paths in source path prefixes using the -r option. We use this in eGenix PyRun to set the prefix to "<pyrun>" since at run-time, the source files won't be available anyway and we want the users to see "this file is built into pyrun".

A traceback looks like this:
      ...
      File "<pyrun>/configparser.py", line 773, in get
      File "<pyrun>/configparser.py", line 374, in before_get
      File "<pyrun>/configparser.py", line 423, in _interpolate_some
    configparser.InterpolationSyntaxError: '%' must be followed by '%' or '(', found: '%12345'

which is quite readable, IMO.

Without -r, the original file path is added, so you must be looking at some other use case.

I agree with Marc-Andrew that it's hard to do anything more useful here than "-r" already does, as we can assume the source code won't be available on the target machine - it's the equivalent of having C/C++ debugging symbols available for C/C++ traceback generation.

It may still be worth doing specifically for the sake of _frozen_importlib (as that usually *does* have the importlib._bootstrap code available at runtime), but I think it would be pretty specific to that particular case.

A more generally applicable feature would be a utility to take a traceback of the form created by -r (as shown by Marc-Andre above), and converting that back to a full traceback given a directory structure that matched the layout of the frozen modules.