[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> The only thing that occurs to me as even a possibility would be some 
> kind of frequently-used system administration utility, like if you were 
> going to rewrite all the bash builtin commands as Python scripts.

This whole discussion is not about whether the start time actually
matters - it is about whether it is a fact or not that eggs improve
the startup. Some people said it does, others said it doesn't, and this
is just the finding-of-facts phase.

Anyway,

 > I'm terribly curious what Python applications exist for whom:
 > 1. Startup time is a consideration, that
 > 2. Haven't already been refactored to a long-running process.

For this, CGI scripts come to mind. Many people use them, and they
are often short-running, and they often get invoked frequently.

> Then why was the python##.zip entry added to sys.path in Python 2.3?  My 
> understanding was that it was added to allow Python to start faster by 
> cutting down on extraneous stat() calls.

PEP 273 doesn't give much rationale:

"Booting"
...
"Just as there are default directories in sys.path, there must be
one or more default zip archives too."

IIRC, it was to simplify deployment, having the entire library in
a single file.

Regards,
Martin