[Python-Dev] Inconsistent behaviour in import/zipimport hooks

[Brett Cannon]

On 11/9/05, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Maybe it makes more sense to deprecate .pyo altogether and instead
> have a post-load optimizer optimize .pyc files according to the
> current optimization settings?
>

But I thought part of the point of .pyo files was that they left out
docstrings and thus had a smaller footprint?  Plus I wouldn't be
surprised if we started to move away from bytecode optimization and
instead tried to do more AST transformations which would remove
possible post-load optimizations.

I would have  no issue with removing .pyo files and have .pyc files
just be as optimized as they  the current settings are and leave it at
that.  Could have some metadata listing what optimizations occurred,
but do we really need to have a specific way to denote if bytecode has
been optimized?  Binary files compiled from C don't note what -O
optimization they were compiled with.  If someone distributes
optimized .pyc files chances are they are going to have a specific
compile step with py_compile and they will know what optimizations
they are using.

-Brett