I have to say up front that I'm somewhat shocked at how quickly this thread has exploded! Since I'm sprinting this week, I haven't thoroughly read every message and won't have time tonight to answer every question, but I'll try to pick out some common ideas. I really appreciate everyone's input and will try to clarify the PEP where I can.
It is probably not clear enough from the PEP, but I actually don't expect that most individual Python developers will use this feature. This is why the -R flag exists and the behavior is turned off by default. When I'm developing some Python code in my home directory, I usually only use one Python version and even if I'm going to test it with multiple Python versions, I won't need to do this *simultaneously*. I will generally blow away all build artifacts (including, but not limited to .pyc files) and then rebuild with the different Python version. I think that this feature will be limited mostly to distros, which have different use cases than individual developers. But these are important use cases for Python to support nonetheless. My rationale for choosing the file system layout in the PEP was to try to present something more familiar to today's Python and to avoid radical reorganization of the way Python caches its byte code. Thus having a sibling directory that differs from the source just by extension seemed more natural to me. Encoding the magic number in the file name under .pyr would I thought make the look up scheme more efficient since the import machinery can craft the file name directly. I agree it's not very human friendly because nobody really knows which magic numbers are associated with which Python versions and flags. As to the question of sibling directories or folder-per-folder I think performance issues should be the deciding factor. There are file system limitations to consider (but also a wide variety of file systems in use). Do the number of stat calls predominate the performance costs? Maybe it makes sense to implement the two different approaches and do some measurements. -Barry
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