can I delete one of *.py *.pyc *.pyo in /usr/lib/python2.3 ?

[Scott David Daniels]

Miernik wrote:
> On my Debian GNU/Linux system I have Python 2.3 installed in
> /usr/lib/python2.3/ where most Python system files like 
> 
> /usr/lib/python2.3/gzip.py
> /usr/lib/python2.3/gzip.pyc
> /usr/lib/python2.3/gzip.pyo
> 
> live, besides of course /usr/bin/python2.3
> 
> I noticed that all those files come in three "flavours":
> *.py *.pyc *.pyo
> 
> Is it possible that only one "flavour" of these files is needed, and I can
> delete the remaining two, any my Python installation will still work?
> 
> The whole /usr/lib/python2.3/ directory takes up over 15 MB, deleting
> two "flavours" would save about 10 MB on my system, and that would help
> me much as I am trying to fit my system on a 256 MB SD card, to make it
> quiet (hard disks are noisy).
> 
> Can I just do 
> cd /usr/lib/python2.3/ && rm -rf *.py && rm -rf *.pyc 
> for example, and everything will still work as before?
> 
You can put them all in a .zip (repeating the structure), named
python23.zip, and put that zip file where the search path looks
for it.  Having built python23.zip, you can delete all the
.py, .pyc, .pyo files you put in the zip.  Compress them
using "DEFLATE", since Python's zipfile module doesn't do
BZIP2 compression (yet).

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org