That's why i disagree (and hate) the automatic compilation of code, my project directory becomes full of object files, and then i need to either delete everything manually or create a script to do the work (not in python, because it'll dirt things even more :). Sometimes i notice python doesn't recompile the .pyc in response to changes in .py (because i share my project folders between computers using Dropbox).
Unless this is just a rant, maybe you could use the PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE environment flag or set the -B flag when executing the python interpreter. This flag deactivates auto-compilation, and may also deactivate __pycache__ effects, but i'm not sure, i can't test it now. See http://docs.python.org/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE . The implications of deactivating this behaviour are somewhat obvious, and i wonder what impacts it'd cause on your system (but i hardly expect it to be anything serious). After reading some articles about it, I've come to think python depends a lot on bytecode writing on the filesystem. I wonder if it's good or bad. I find it so invasive, and that it should not be the default behaviour. But that's me, i'm sure most of python users don't mind at all.
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