[Python-Dev] PEP 3147, pycache directories and umask (original) (raw)

Isaac Morland ijmorlan at uwaterloo.ca
Wed Mar 24 01:50:20 CET 2010

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

The main point of the pycache proposal is to solve the needs of Ubuntu/Debian packagers. If you are developing (rather than deploying or building packages), you shouldn't have these needs AFAICT.

Maybe it's one point, but I'm not sure it's the main one. It's the only reason the PEP was originally designed, and proposed.

At least one additional use case has appeared. Actually, my use case was mentioned long ago, but I didn't really push (e.g. by writing a patch) and nobody jumped on it. But this PEP solves my case too, so it should not be ignored just because the immediate impetus for the PEP is another case.

Personally I would benefit most from it during development. Why? What benefit would it bring to you?

I'm sure Greg will jump in if I'm wrong about what he is saying, but the benefit to me and to Greg and to others writing .py code is that our directories will contain *.py and pycache, rather than *.py and *.pyc. So it will be much easier to see what is actually there.

Or if we're using SVN and we do "svn status", the only spurious result will be "? pycache" rather than "? X.pyc" for every X.py in the directory.

Or whatever other good effects come from having less junk in our source directories.

Directory tidiness is a positive general feature with at least a few specific benefits.

Isaac Morland CSCF Web Guru DC 2554C, x36650 WWW Software Specialist

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