Hmm... This should not be necessary. It is already handled by FrozenImporter.find_spec() (in Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py). If path is not getting set then something went wrong and needs to be fixed.

Is it here to provide a fallback for the config->stdlib_dir == NULL case?

Something is not working right when embedding Python.

😞

I'll try to take a look this week.

FYI, I spent some time looking at this today. I take back what I said: "This should not be necessary." The approach you took is probably good enough until we can find a better solution. I plan on troubleshooting the test_embed failures if you don't figure them out first.

The problem is that sys._stdlib_dir is set to None. This can happen in some embedding scenarios (for now). This is the reason why FrozenImporter.find_spec() doesn't populate encodings.__path__ in the failing tests. It is why _set_encodings_path() is failing.

The problem is that sys._stdlib_dir is set to None. sys._stdlib_dir is set from _Py_GetStdlibDir(), which returns the value calculated by the getpath.c code during runtime init. In some embedding cases that code refuses to extrapolate the stdlib dir, so it ends up None.

FrozenImporter.find_spec() uses sys._stdlib_dir to figured out the encodings.__path__ entry to add. If the stdlib dir is unknown then it doesn't add any. This is also why _set_encodings_path() isn't working.

We have several options:

1. extrapolate sys._stdlib_dir some other way
2. fall back to using the non-frozen encodings module
3. freeze all "encodings" submodules

(2) effectively accomplishes the same thing as (1), though it doesn't actually update sys._stdlib_dir. Furthermore, we already know it works. (2) also has the benefit of being very simple, since we'd use the normal import machinery unchanged. (Note that (1) and (2) are not guaranteed to find the stdlib dir. However, with (2) that failure mode already exists, so embedders would already have to deal with it.) (3) would get what we want but would make the compiled binary bigger and would add a bunch of noise to make output when building.

So I recommend (2).

(2) involves 2 things: drop _set_encodings_path() here, and update FrozenImporter.find_spec().

diff --git a/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py b/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py
index afb95f4e1d..4200afae7c 100644
--- a/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py
+++ b/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py
@@ -941,6 +941,9 @@ def find_spec(cls, fullname, path=None, target=None):
                                 origin=cls._ORIGIN,
                                 is_package=ispkg)
         filename, pkgdir = cls._resolve_filename(origname, fullname, ispkg)
+        if ispkg and not pkgdir:
+            # We can't resolve __path__, so Fall back to the path finder.
+            return None
         spec.loader_state = type(sys.implementation)(
             filename=filename,
             origname=origname,