On Feb 01, 2010, at 08:26 AM, Tim Delaney wrote:

The pyc/pyo files are just an optimisation detail, and are essentially temporary. Given that, if they were to live in a single directory, to me it seems obvious that the default location for that should be in the system temporary directory. I an immediately think of the following advantages:

1. No one really complains too much about putting things in /tmp unless it starts taking up too much space. In which case they delete it and if it gets reused, it gets recreated.

IIUC the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard correctly, then these files really should go under /var/cache/python. (Don't ask me where that would be on non-FHS compliant systems <cough>Windows</cough>). I've explained in other followups why I don't particularly like separating the source from the cache files though, but if you wanted a sick approach: Take the full absolutely path to the .py file, plus the magic number, plus the time stamp and hash that. Cache the pyc file under /var/cache/python/<hash>. -Barry