A zipapp is not a hack, it's an official feature of the python stdlib (as shown in the parent comment), and is made for the specific use case of grouping severa

A zipapp is not a hack, it's an official feature of the python stdlib (as shown in the parent comment), and is made for the specific use case of grouping several files into one module for ease of sharing. All of this works fine with python 2.7 as long as you put the rest of your code in your main() entry point, which you should do anyway. So an f-string would cause no problem. Also, "informative stack trace" is only informative to another dev, and an experienced one at that, given how many juniors I encounter that can't read a traceback. Indeed, you script users may not be devs, and for those, a traceback would be confusing. For this reason, a script should only output a traceback in dev mode, but in production, if the dev flag is not set (-X dev), you should never see a traceback. It's a good practice to suppress it with sys.excepthook, and log it into a file instead. Using a syntax error like you do for this purpose IS the big hack. Now I'm not against a hack. I can see the value of it for your own scripts, of things that you code quick and dirty style. After all, I don't always want to have a clean entry point and more than one file.