[Distutils] Adding entry points into Distutils ?

[P.J. Eby]

At 06:57 PM 5/4/2009 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>* I'm uncomfortable with the way entry points are scanned.  I 
>haven't looked close enough to back it up with numbers, but I think 
>there's a noticeable performance degradation when the number of 
>installed packages becomes large.  (Given the algorithm this would 
>be expected.)

It's linear in the number of entry_points.txt files, yes, but in most 
apps it should occur at most once, since pkg_resources has a single 
WorkingSet object holding Distribution objects which cache their 
entry point data upon first access.

There are all sorts of ways you could make different tradeoffs, but 
this particular set of tradeoffs was optimized for a 
single-application environment, rather than a massive global shared 
site-packages where there are plugins for every application on the 
system.  It was also optimized for the zipimport case, because you 
can tell whether a project has entry points from its cached zip 
directory, that's needed at startup anyhow.