On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> wrote: > If it was intended to be reusable code, I'd think it -should- go in > site-packages. > > But so much code in site-packages isn't intended to be reusable.
Can you give some examples? Looking through my site-packages directory, everything in there is either used by multiple applications or at least has the potential to be. Frankly, if you've installed a third-party package and written your own code against it, even if only in one little script, isn't that already reuse? > And even for stuff that's reusable, there are advantages to just duplicating > them for the purposes of each application, because you never know when one > of them is going to need a different version from another. Definitely a situation for virtualenv, IMO. >> The site module has to process any .pth files in the site-packages, >> but apart from that, I think the actual amount of stuff in >> site-packages should be irrelevant. > > Irrelevant to what? More stuff in site slowing things down? Are .pth's > not correlated with more stuff in site-packages? Aren't they actually a > thing In site? Yes, but I just don't expect the .pth files to grow that fast. I've got something like 30 packages in my site-packages and only 6 .pth files, and most of those are one-liners. Right now this all seems highly speculative to me. I think it might be informative, either to you or to me, to do an actual timing test. Why don't you try setting up two side-by-side installations of Python, one with all the site-packages cruft, and one trimmed down to only what you think should be in there, and see if you can measure a real difference in startup time? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
