[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Bob Ippolito]

On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:27 PM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>> Note by the way that "scan all these ZIP files" is a misleading  
>> term in any
>> case - the files are not "scanned".  They are opened, and a small  
>> amount of
>> data is read from the end of the file.  Nothing that I would consider
>> "scanning" is involved.
>
> The data read from the end of the file is the directory
> which is decoded using marshal functions. You normally
> call this scanning data.
>
> Like Martin said: you always have to read the whole ZIP
> directory - even if you're just interested in a single
> module with the file.
>
> Actually loading the module then requires decompressing
> the code which takes a whole lot longer than just reading
> a file from the file system.

Last I checked, CPUs and RAM are a lot faster than disk.  Unless it's  
sitting in cache already, reading a zip should be way faster than  
reading an uncompressed file.  On top of that, I don't think egg zips  
are compressed by default...

-bob