[Fedora-packaging] To .pyo or not to .pyo?
Jeff Pitman
symbiont at berlios.de
Thu Aug 11 17:20:00 UTC 2005
On Thursday 11 August 2005 10:29, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> I'm a python neophyte, but I've been packaging some python packages
> and have questions about .pyo files. I've gotten various feedback
> about including them, not including them, and using %ghost on them.
> Can someone please explain what the issues are (both with arch and
> noarch packages)? Also, what does %ghost do?
Arch/Noarch, it's the same. The issues have to do with whether they
provide the bang vs. buck (buck being diskspace in this case) that
you'd want. I think fedora-extras in general goes with the %ghost
method because it was deemed that they don't.
%ghost deletes those files upon package removal. The reason you want
%ghost is because if you run a python script that starts with:
#!/usr/bin/python -O
or
# python -O /usr/share/script/main.py
Then .pyo files will automatically litter your harddrive. %ghost will
clean these up.
Currently, .pyo provides two optimizations:
1. (-O) some peephole bytecode optimization to improve startup.
2. (-OO) get rid of the docstrings to streamline the code.
#2 could be bad in that some testing relies on docstrings. -OO is never
really used in packages.
#1 -- I heard that this may be just included without -O in a future
release. I don't know. Depends on how pedantic the PowersThatBe want
the bytecode to map against the code that's just been parsed/lexed.
Anyway, hope that helps. Policy is to %ghost .pyo for add-on modules in
extras, I believe. (Although baseline python will always have .pyo in
the lib directory.)
I for one, don't really care since were talking about saving kilobytes
of diskspace... YMMV.
--
-jeff
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