[Distutils] Adding entry points into Distutils ?

[Tarek Ziadé]

2009/5/5 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> At 06:57 PM 5/4/2009 -0500, Ian Bicking wrote:
>>
>> * I'm uncomfortable with the way entry points are scanned.  I haven't
>> looked close enough to back it up with numbers, but I think there's a
>> noticeable performance degradation when the number of installed packages
>> becomes large.  (Given the algorithm this would be expected.)
>
> It's linear in the number of entry_points.txt files, yes, but in most apps
> it should occur at most once, since pkg_resources has a single WorkingSet
> object holding Distribution objects which cache their entry point data upon
> first access.
>
> There are all sorts of ways you could make different tradeoffs, but this
> particular set of tradeoffs was optimized for a single-application
> environment, rather than a massive global shared site-packages where there
> are plugins for every application on the system.  It was also optimized for
> the zipimport case, because you can tell whether a project has entry points
> from its cached zip directory, that's needed at startup anyhow.
>

Would it make sense then to maintain an global index of all entry
points, that would be updated
upon installation / uninstallation (if it's added like we wrote in PEP 376)
rather than scanning the paths everytime ?

we could have one index file per site-package-like directory, and
discover index files
rather than all directories / zip files.

Extra paths added in sys.path would be omited but I don't see it as a problem



-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org