(pardon any awkward formatting, writing from webinterface instead of a "proper" client. Please yell at me off-list or on irc if this post is excessively broken.)
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300922 >From that bug: > - chpathtool does some "simple" heuristic to switch the build EPREFIX > to the new target EPREFIX > > - python (seemingly) doesn't like when the pyc files are changed and *not* > regenerated. > You will see the message: "Bad marshalling data" I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this correctly, but it sounds as if your chpathtool edits the .pyc file to replace the path? If yes: that will indeed not work, as strings are stored length-prefixed. You cannot sensibly edit .pyc files, you should normally just rewrite them. The .pyc/.pyo file store a version-dependent magic, the mtime of their corresponding .py file, and (since recently) the size of the correspondig .py file. If either changes the .pyc/.pyo is regenerated. The magic does not normally change in released pythons, so that's not much of a problem. The mtime is probably no longer a problem these days either. There used to be a more subtle problem: the python objects you import have the path to their source embedded into them, and if you move the .pyc/.pyo file around that path would be wrong, confusing some (mostly debugging) tools (see http://bugs.python.org/issue1180193 ). This was fixed fairly recently (in python 3, python 2.7 and python 2.6.2), so it is probably no longer worth worrying about, but it's probably one reason these files were handled this way in the past. -- Marien Zwart (marienz)
