Phillip J. Eby wrote:
<snip>
Note also that in many cases, the package will be a single .egg file,
(analagous to a Java .jar file) rather than a directory, and files are
preferable to directories in most cases as they make Python import
processing faster.
<snip>
Yes, it's true, zipfile import processing is faster than normal import
processing; it is in fact one of the reasons zipfile imports were added to
Python, because the zip directories are cached. A zipfile import lookup is
a single dictionary lookup, whereas a directory import lookup requires
multiple stat() calls. For all practical purposes, zipfiles added to
sys.path are free after the initial directory read operation.
Maybe an easier way to understand this (at least my impression) is that
zip files are treated as read-only. Any directory on sys.path gets
scanned everytime a new module is imported. And you never know if
someone added something, so you do it all over again each time. A zip
file is scanned only once.
--
Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org
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