On 22 September 2000, M.-A. Lemburg said:
It's not as expensive as it sounds... on my machine I can't even notice a difference.
I tried it on my machine: spawning a new interpreter to byte-compile every file in the Distutils is nearly a 100% penalty: 13 sec vs a little under 7 sec. So I think it's worth the trouble.
Right. I don't care about the RPM size at all: bandwidth is there, harddisk's are cheap. Size is not as much an argument anymore as it was some years ago.
I mostly agree, but turning off byte-compilation should be an option. (Certainly not the default!)
Byte-compiling at build time would also (I think) make it easier to distribute *only* bytecode, for those poor unenlightened souls who somehow think that keeping their source code to themselves will make the world a better place. (Obviously I disagree with those people, but I don't want to bar them from using the Distutils.)
Ah, you are forgetting about the few of us who have to make a living by writing commercial closed source software, e.g. my apps are only shipped with PYO files with doc-strings stripped.
No, I am proposing to change the situation to accomodate people who only distribute byte-code. Right now, all built distributions always include source, because they must pseudo-install the source in order to compile it. If we do compilation at build-time, that should make it easier to distribute only byte-code. If you want to distribute only byte-code, you'd have to sneak some code into the appropriate bdist commands to delete source files after pseudo-installation but before constructing the archive.
I still think software wants to be free, but I'm not going to shove that philosophy down anyone's throat. ;-)
Most of the underlying helpers are Open Source though, ie. the mx Extensions were written for just this purpose -- not only to get a warm fuzzy feeling from community feedback ;-)
If we byte-compile at build time, then using the standard compileall module/script is a no-brainer: the build directory is purely the domain of this particular module distribution, so if we blindly walk over it compiling everything, that's just fine. (Doing that in the real install directory would be quite rude, which is why the current byte-compilation code doesn't use compileall.py.)
Hmm, the existing logic works just fine -- why change it ?
I can see a couple reasons to change compilation to build time:
* it just seems right: installation should be limited to copying files around, possibly setting modes, and nothing more. More complicated stuff, including compilation, should be done at *build* time... that's why it's called "build" time!
* should make it easier to support closed source distributions
And one good reason not to change it (apart from inertia):
* makes it trickier to put the right source filename into the .pyc file (not that that's being done currently, as you can see from a traceback in code installed by a Distutils-generated RPM file; the .pyc files refer to /var/tmp/.../usr/lib/python1.5/... rather than /usr/lib/python1.5/...)
Am I missing anything?
Greg