[Python-Dev] Inconsistent behaviour in import/zipimport hooks

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:32 AM 11/9/2005 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>On 11/9/05, Osvaldo Santana <osantana at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've noticed this inconsistency when we stop to use zipimport in our
> > Python For Maemo distribution. We've decided to stop using zipimport
> > because the device (Nokia 770) uses a compressed filesystem.
>
>I won't comment further on the brainstorm that's going on (this is
>becoming a topic for c.l.py) but I think you are misunderstanding the
>point of zipimport. It's not done (usually) for the compression but
>for the index. Finding a name in the zipfile index is much more
>efficient than doing a directory search; and the zip index can be
>cached.

zipimport also helps distribution convenience - a large and elaborate 
package can be distributed in a single zipfile (such as is built by 
setuptools' "bdist_egg" command) and simply placed on PYTHONPATH or 
directly on sys.path.  And tools like py2exe can also append all an 
application's modules to an executable file in zipped form.