On May 23, 2014, at 09:49 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I would also like to remind people the reason why there are separate pyc and pyo files: they are separate to support precompilation of the standard library and installed 3rd party packages for different optimization levels.
In fact, Debian (and I'm sure other OSes with package managers) precompiles source files at installation time. We have a couple of bugs languishing to provide -OO optimization levels as an option when doing this precompilation. I haven't pushed this forward because I got side-tracked by the overloading of .pyo files for -O and -OO optimization levels. I agree that the flags, mechanisms, and semantics should be worked out first, but I also think that PEP 3147 tagging will provide a nice ui for the file system representation of the optimization levels. death-to-pyo-files-ly y'rs, -Barry