[Python-Dev] pycache creation (original) (raw)

Ron Adam rrr at ronadam.com
Mon Mar 22 20:02:42 CET 2010

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Isaac Morland <ijmorlan uwaterloo.ca> writes:

IMO, all these issues militate for putting pycache creation out of the interpreter core, and in the hands of third-party package-time/ install-time tools (or distutils). Speaking only for myself, but really for anybody who likes tidy source directories, I hope some version of the pycache proposal becomes part of standard Python, by which I ideally mean it's enabled by default but if that is just not a good idea then at most it should be required to set a command-line option to get this feature. This doesn't contradict by my proposal. What I am proposing is that the creation of pycache /directories/ be put outside of the core. It can be part of distutils, or of a separate module, or delegated to third-party tools. It could even be as simple as "python -m compileall --pycache", if someone implements it. Creation of the pycache /contents/ (files inside the directory) would still be part of core Python, but only if the directory exists and is writable by the current process.

+1

If I understand correctly, we would have the current mode as the default, and can trigger pycache behavior simply by manually creating a pycache directory and deleting any byte-code files in the module/program directory.

I like this, it is easy to understand and can be used without messing with flags or environment variables.

Ron

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list