MySQL Bugs: #62143: Allow Python plugins to be released as compiled .pyc (plus code protection)

Bug #62143	Allow Python plugins to be released as compiled .pyc (plus code protection)
Submitted:	10 Aug 2011 22:10	Modified:	9 Jan 2015 15:56
Reporter:	Karsten Wutzke	Email Updates:
Status:	No Feedback	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	5.2.34	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	plugins, python

Description:
Currently WB only allows Python source files to be installed as plugins. There are however certain situations in which open sourcing personal work isn't desirable. It would be great to share this work with the public by making the compiled .pyc plugins installable in WB nontheless.

Please support the distribution of binary .pyc plugins.

Note that WB should ideally support a binary file format that fulfills some kind of DRM or at least incorporate some mechanism to protect the compiled Python code from being decompiled. Maybe after/during the installation of the plugin MySQL WB would require a key to be entered or even better request it from some URL.

How to repeat:
-

Suggested fix:
Implement some way of installing pre-compiled Python files and ideally provide some protection mechanisms so that the .pyc files can't be decompiled.

Changed from S1 to S4. Critical nontheless.

Ultimately code protection is more important than binary .pyc file support. Of course you could apply DRM-like mechanisms to the source files as well. Decompilation however would be another step to protect against attackers. DRM would be great for plugin developers.

Thank you for the feature request.