Support entrypoint references in -m

[alicederyn]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

I'd like to adopt entry-points more at my company (we currently have top-level .py files that are often simple redirects to entry-point-style functions), but concern has been raised that there's no simple way for devs to mimic an entry-point invocation without installing their module, which is a hurdle to training. I'd like to extend -m to support entry-point syntax, i.e.

python -m importable.module:entrypoint_function [args...]

This should be roughly equivalent to adding this as a console_scripts entry-point, installing the module, and calling the entry-point from the bin dir:

• the function will be expected to look at sys.argv to see what's been passed in
• the first three elements in argv will be replaced with a single entry, so [args...] will be in argv[1:]

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

No response given

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[alicederyn]

@pablogsal who I talked to about this offline

[picnixz]

Isn't it already possible via fire or something like that? I would also suggest to open a DPO discussion to gather design feedback just in case (core dev support seems already there).