[Distutils] .py vs .pyc (was: Newbie questions about setuptools)

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Jun 19, 2007, at 10:33 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

>> 2.  The resulting egg file is much larger than the .zip file  
>> created by
>> 'python setup.py sdist' in spite of exclude_package_data = { '':
>> ['*.pyc','*.pyo']},
>>
>> Is there any way to exclude .pyc and .pyo files?
>
> No; you can exclude the source if you like, though, with
> --exclude-source-files.  Eggs are a binary distribution format,
> originally developed to support user-installed plugins for systems
> like Chandler, Zope, etc.  They aren't a source distribution format;
> sdist works well enough for that and for easy_install if you have a
> pure-Python package (or your users have C compilers).

I would prefer to ship compiled C modules and source .py files.  For  
one thing, compressed source .py files are usually around 25% smaller  
than compressed .pyc files.  For another thing, I value making source  
available to the end-user, and I am loathe to ship non-source unless  
I really have to (which I pretty much do for C extension modules).

So, please accept this as a feature request to make the above- 
mentioned behavior configurable for users such as me.

Regards,

Zooko