[Pythonmac-SIG] appscript terminology caching

[Eric Nieuwland]

On 19-okt-04, at 21:29, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> On Oct 19, 2004, at 15:15, Eric Nieuwland wrote:
>> Well, why not optionally freeze the terminology in advance into a 
>> specific area like .../site-packages/terminology. Let's call it a 
>> cache to keep has happy.
>> Then, from your program you could use (extending has' example):
>>
>> 	itunes = app('eppc://20.20.20.20/iTunes', 
>> usingtermsfrom='iTunes.app', terminology=X)
>>
>> where X is:
>> 	frozen		to get Bob's preferred system
>> 	cached		to get has' idea
>> 	application	to always obtain the terminology from the current 
>> application (possibly putting in the cache)
>
> But *why* put it there?  Why not with your application?  You need 
> admin access to touch site-packages, and considering that multiple 
> terminology-using applications and possibly multiple users would use 
> the same cache area makes it rather problematic.
>
> I'm not at all convinced that it's worth doing.  For the cases where 
> you need the efficiency, you freeze it to a particular python module 
> named whatever you want, wherever you need it to be.  This has the 
> added bonus of being discoverable by dependency walking (mostly 
> packaging) utilities since you will be importing it explicitly.  
> Otherwise, you look it up dynamically and take the speed hit.  Why 
> make it more complicated?
>
> The only situation I can come up with where you would really notice is 
> if you had some throwaway python script that you were spawning a whole 
> bunch of times to do something (a la shell script).  The solution is 
> to not do that.  Make the script long-running and take a bunch of 
> parameters on argv or from stdin, or make it a module and use it 
> directly from the calling script (assuming its Python as well).  
> Either way will be a whole heck of a lot faster because (a) you've 
> make the terminology lookup constant time (b) you've made the python 
> interpreter startup/shutdown constant time.

I really don't know what "the best" solution would be. In such cases I 
try not to force myself into any direction and come up with a solution 
that supports most variants.

--eric