[Distutils] cracked eggs

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:03 AM 6/20/2005 -0400, Ryan Tomayko wrote:
>I've noticed that many packages that use __file__ and path operations
>instead of the pkg_resources / PEP 302 APIs to load package data
>usually work fine if you move the .egg file out of the way and then
>extract it to a directory with the same name. I have a little shell
>script ("crack_egg") that does this for me but I was wondering if
>this might be something that package authors could specify for their
>packages somehow, or maybe easy_install could take a command line arg
>or something?

It does!  The  --zip-ok/-z flag.  By default, EasyInstall unpacks eggs that 
it builds from source.  However, it assumes that packages being 
*distributed* as eggs are "egg-ready".


>I remember reading somewhere that .egg files speed up import times
>over .egg directories because the zip index is quicker than the file
>system or something. But is it really that significant?

The issue is that it gets worse as you add more and more directories to 
sys.path.  The zip index is quicker than the filesystem because it's loaded 
at most once, and kept in memory thereafter.  So the disk access for a 
zipfile is O(1), but for a directory it's O(N).


>  Considering
>that a decent number of potential eggs are broken due to the resource
>API I wonder if it might be nice to have the option to prefer .egg
>directories for all packages installed by easy_install (e.g. by
>defaulting some option in ~/pydistutils.cfg).

It's already the default for eggs built from source; you have to explicitly 
request installation as a zip file.  Eventually, the option will default 
the other way, when most everything out there works as eggs anyway.