[Distutils] Design rationale for the egg format ?

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 June 2010 07:59, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a few questions about the egg format implementation, and was
>> hoping people who designed it could answer them:
>>  - why does the filename encode some metadata (which python version if
>> the package contains extensions, platform specifier) ?
>
> I'm not one of the designers, nor an expert, but I believe that this
> is so that the basic metadata can be obtained as part of an initial
> listdir(), without needing to open and read a file at all - so
> essentially it's to reduce the number of OS calls needed in certain
> key cases.

Do you happen to know what those key cases are ?

cheers,

David