Re: [Distutils] Design rationale for the egg format ?

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Paul Moore wrote:

On 14 June 2010 07:59, David Cournapeau wrote:

...

Hi,

I have a few questions about the egg format implementation, and was hoping people who designed it could answer them:  - why does the filename encode some metadata (which python version if the package contains extensions, platform specifier) ?

I'm not one of the designers, nor an expert, but I believe that this is so that the basic metadata can be obtained as part of an initial listdir(), without needing to open and read a file at all - so essentially it's to reduce the number of OS calls needed in certain key cases.

Do you happen to know what those key cases are ? cheers, David