Re: [Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

["Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de>]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> 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.

The difference is that a directory inside site-python is not scanned
*at all* if the application looks for some other package. Only the
top-level site-python directory is read, and it is not scanned, but
instead a lookup operation directly asks for the subdirectory with
the package name.

If you have many zipfiles on sys.path, all applications will suffer
from having to read the TOC of all those zipfiles, even if they need
none of them. OTOH, if you had packages inside site-python, the
contents of the unused packages is simply ignored.

Regards,
Martin