PJ Eby <pje <at> telecommunity.com> writes: > > That is all easy_install does: add a naming convention for the > directories, and automate the sys.path manipulation. > > Buildout does the same thing, it just writes the sys.path manipulation > into the scripts statically, instead of using pkg_resources at > runtime. > > So the notion of "cost" doesn't make any sense. Tools like > easy_install and buildout *reduce* the management cost, they don't add > anything to core Python. > > (Now, if you're talking about the .pth files from easy_install, those > are something that I added because people complained about having to > use require(), and wanted to have a default version available in the > interpreter.)
Pre-3.3, there is a non-negligible runtime cost per sys.path entry, because each import tries importing multiple filenames for each sys.path entry. Post-3.3, things should be better (thanks to the directory contents cache), but there's still a computational overhead for each sys.path entry. So, yes, easy_install adding sys.path entries *by default* using .pth files is clearly not costless. pip doesn't have this problem AFAIK (it doesn't create .pth files). Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
