On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:58 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb@colorstudy.com> wrote:
The one issue I thought would be resolved by not easily allowing .pyc-only distributions is the case when you rename a file (say module.py to newmodule.py) and there is a module.pyc laying around, and you don't get the ImportError you would expect from "import module" -- and to make it worse everything basically works, except there's two versions of the module that slowly become different. This regularly causes problems for me, and those problems would get more common and obscure if the pyc files were stashed away in a more invisible location.
I can't even tell what the current proposal is; maybe this is resolved? If distributing bytecode required renaming pyc files to .py as Glenn suggested that would resolve the problem quite nicely from my perspective. (Frankly I find the whole use case for distributing bytecodes a bit specious, but whatever.)
Barry's PEP would fix this even if we kept supporting .pyc-only files: the lingering .pyc files will be in the __pycache__ directory which is *not* searched -- only .pyc files directly in the source directory will be found -- where the PEP will never place them, at least not by default. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)