On Jan 17, 10:17 am, jmfauth <wxjmfa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > No, I'm sorry, they're not obvious at all. > > These reasons become obious as soon as you start working. > > Let's take a practical point view. It did not take a long time > to understand, that it is much simpler to delete the __pycache__ > directory everytime I compile my scripts than to visit it just > because I deleted or renamed a .py file in my working directory.
According to PEP 3147, stale *.pyc files in the __pycache__ directories are ignored. So it's no longer necessary to delete the *.pyc files when renaming a *.py file. This is a big improvement, and easily justifies __pycache__ IMO, even without the distro considerations. > How long will it take to find on the web tools to parse and > delete ophan .pyc files on a hd? Probably under a month. (Updating old tools to work with new scheme will take a bit longer.) > If I get (stupidly, I agree) a .pyc file and want to test > it. Should I create manually a cache alongside my test.py > script? Nope: according to PEP 3147 a standalone *.pyc should not be put in same directory where the source file would have been, not in the __pycache__ directory (it'll be considered stale otherwise). It says this is for backwards compatibility, but I think there are valid reasons you don't want to deliver source so it's good that we can still do that. > If I wish to delete the numerous auxiliary files a TeX > document produces, I just del /rm .* to keep a clean working > dir. With Python now? Impossible! The files are spread in two > dirs (at least). > > ... > > That's life, unfortunately. Give yourself a little time. The one little non-temporary drawback I see for __pycache__ is if you have a directory with lots of stuff and one or two python files in the mix; and then you add that directory to sys.path and import the files. It creates the __pycache__ in that directory. It's a bit of a shock compared to the *.pyc files because it's at a very different place in the listings, and is a directory and not a file. But that's a minor thing. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
