Dieter Maurer wrote: > Really? > > Is the interpreter unable to call "C" functions ("stat" for example) > to determine whether an object exists before it puts it on "path".
What do you mean, "unable to"? It just doesn't. Could it? Perhaps, if somebody wrote a patch. Would the patch be accepted? Perhaps, if it didn't break something else. In the past, there was a silent guarantee that you could add items to sys.path, and only later create the directories behind these items. I don't know whether people rely on this guarantee. > The application was Zope importing about 2.500 modules > from 2 zip files "zope.zip" and "python24.zip". > This resulted in about 12.500 opens -- about 4 times more > than would be expected -- about 10.000 of them failing opens. I see. Out of curiosity: how much startup time was saved when sys.path was explicitly stripped to only contain these two zip files? I would expect that importing 2500 modules takes *way* more time than doing 10.000 failed opens. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list