Don't include .pyc files in the .deb about dh-virtualenv HOT 6 CLOSED

If you don't, performance will drop dramatically.

from dh-virtualenv.

Okay, makes sense. Normal Debian packages do this upon installation, hence the confusion.

from dh-virtualenv.

Actually they just end up in there because everything is copied in. As a bonus, the startup times of the interpreter are faster when they are copied in there (otherwise one would be compiling the bytecode upon every start, unless running as root).

Smart way of doing this would be not to ship the pyc files but have a trigger that would cause the pyc-files generated upon installation, just to be on the safe side if there were some minor differences between the host interpreter and the one shipped with virtualenv (don't know though if this is really a possible scenario to find two interpreters that interoperate yet produce different bytecode).

from dh-virtualenv.

I just noticed it because pylint complains a lot about it, and regular Python packages (dh_python) have install-time hooks to compile the .pyc files.

from dh-virtualenv.

To my knowledge, dh-python does this because you can have several python 2.X installed on the same debian, dh-python compiles for each version installed.
It could be a performance problem when a dh-virtualenv package has been made for a specific version of python 2.X, and finally you use another version on your system.

from dh-virtualenv.

Yeah, supporting different versions is the main gain of the dh-python's way. As a bonus, no need to ship .pyc files.

What comes to the performance problem, I doubt finding a case where we would generate non-compatible bytecode but still be able to use the interpreter shipped in the virtualenv are par to none

from dh-virtualenv.