[Distutils] idea for Distribute: make unzipped eggs be the default

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn<zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue33 # zipped eggs cause various
> problems -- perhaps set default setting to unzipped?

+1

> Perhaps the Distribute project should consider installing eggs unzipped by
> default.  It would avoid a slew of problems (see that ticket for a catalog
> of problems), would be fully backwards compatible (it is what many people
> already do, per the suggested workaround, and I've never heard a report of a
> problem due to an *unzipped* egg), and I think it might improve performance
> a bit.  (Yes, that's right -- we haven't done a real measurement of
> performance, but the few times that people briefly glanced at performance it
> seemed like zipping the eggs made them slower to load, not faster.)

The measurements I know of suggest that having lots of zipped eggs for
each package doesn't provide any benefit whatsoever and is usually
worse than normal unzipped eggs.

Only if you combine a whole lot of packages and code into one giant
manually crafted egg, you sometimes get benefits from it. But that's a
specific deployment optimization that should be left to specific
situations.

Hanno