Understanding .pth in site-packages

[Stephen Hansen]

On 8/27/11 3:41 PM, Josh English wrote:
> I have .egg files in my system path. The Egg file created by my setup script doesn't include anything but the introductory text. If I open other eggs I see the zipped data, but not for my own files.

Sounds like your setup.py isn't actually including your source.
> 
> Is having a zipped egg file any faster than a regular package? or does it just prevent people from seeing the code?

IIUC, its nominally very slightly faster to use an egg, because it can
skip a lot of filesystem calls. But I've only heard that and can't
completely confirm it (internal testing at my day job did not
conclusively support this, but our environments are uniquely weird).

But that speed boost (if even true) isn't really the point of
eggs-as-files -- eggs are just easy to deal with as files is all. They
don't prevent people from seeing the code*, they're just regular zip
files and can be unzipped fine.

I almost always install unzip my eggs on a developer machine, because I
inevitably want to go poke inside and see what's actually going on.

-- 

   Stephen Hansen
   ... Also: Ixokai
   ... Mail: me+list/python (AT) ixokai (DOT) io
   ... Blog: http://meh.ixokai.io/

* Although you can make an egg and then go and remove all the .PY files
from it, and leave just the compiled .PYC files, and Python will load it
fine. At the day job, that's what we do. But, you have to be aware that
this ties the egg to a specific version of Python, and its not difficult
for someone industrious to disassemble and/or decompile the PYC back to
effectively equivalent PY files to edit away if they want.

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