when byte-compiling files in a deb/rpm package distributed e.g. in a Linux distribution, it is sometimes wanted to only touch the files found in the deb/rpm, which can be a subset of the files in a directory. the attached patch now lets compileall accept files as arguments as well and adds the recognition of @<filelist> and @- to expand the arguments with the contents of the file (@- meaning to read for stdin). Is this ok for 2.7, and a port of that to 3.2?

+1 on this functionality being added for 2.7 and 3.2.  You also mentioned in pvt email that it would be better to patch compileall.py than py_compile.py to take advantage of the quiet and force options (which seems good to me).

I have a few comments on the diff:

* It no longer applies cleanly to trunk.  There was a recent commit that removed an unnecessary catch of KeyboardInterrupt, and I think that's what's causing the hunk reject.

* I don't like @filename and @- as the syntax for reading the compilation list from a file.  Since -f is already taken, what about adding -i<file> which tells it where to take the list from?  Of course '-i -' would mean stdin.

* Please add tests for the new functionality to test_compileall.py

Bonus points for updating this to modern Python <wink>.  E.g. using True/False instead of 1/0, and 'OSError as error' instead of 'os.error, e'.  But don't worry about that too much; I'll probably take that on as part of my PEP 3147 work. ;)

changed the @ syntax to an option -i, and added a test for compile_file/compile_dir.

Looks good to me, and should help distros, so +1.

fixed for 2.7 and 3.2

I have added versionadded directives that were missing in the doc.

I also added the missing function description.