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 _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
