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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Mar 22 21:38:42 CET 2010

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Mar 22, 2010, at 02:02 PM, Ron Adam wrote:

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.

Huh? Last time I looked weren't we going to make pycache the default (and eventually only) behavior?

I like this, it is easy to understand and can be used without messing with flags or environment variables. Well, for a package with subpackages, it gets more complicated.  Definitely not something you're likely to do manually.  Antoine's suggestion of 'python -m compileall --pycache' would work, but I think it's also obscure enough that most Python users won't get the benefit.

I see only two reasonable solutions for pycache creation -- either we change all setup/install scripts (both for core Python and for 3rd party packages) to always create a pycache subdirectory for every directory (including package directories) installed; or we somehow create it the first time it's needed.

But creating it as needed runs into at least similar problems with ownership as creating .pyc files when first needed (if the parent directory is root-owned a mere mortal can't create it at all). So even apart from the security issue (which I haven't thought about deeply) I think precreation should at least be an easily accessible option both for the core (where it can be done by compileall) and for 3rd party packages (where I guess it's up to distutils or whatever install mechanism is used).

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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