Odd files; just left behind?

[Robin Becker]

Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> Robin Becker a écrit :
>> John J. Lee wrote:
>>
>>> Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> I see a folder .python-eggs in my home directory on one of our servers
>>>> with various .so files
>>>>
>>>> ~/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.3-freebsd-6.1-SECURITY-i386.egg-tmp/_mysql.so 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> are these just left behind from some install process?
>>>
>>> Ah, it's about the resource extraction feature of setuptools.  It's
>>> possible for zipped eggs to contain resources that have to be
>>> extracted to the filesystem.  It puts them in the directory you saw
>>> (or somewhere else -- see the docstring in my other reply).
>>>
>>> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PkgResources#resource-extraction
>>> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#automatic-resource-extraction 
>>>
>> .....
>> Thanks John, but why not clean up?
>>
> Does it needs to be "cleaned up" ? .so files (shared libs) *need* to be 
> extracted from the egg to be usable. Where they are extracted is IIRC 
> configurable...
You're right! These files aren't temporary? It seems strange that the python 
files live with their associated lib/site-packages and the .so files are 
somewhere entirely different.

Python 2.3.6 (#1, Jun  7 2007, 10:44:52)
[GCC 3.4.4 [FreeBSD] 20050518] on freebsd6
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> import MySQLdb
 >>> print MySQLdb.__file__
/myhome/PYTHON/lib/python2.3/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.3-freebsd-6.1-SECURITY-i386.egg/MySQLdb/__init__.pyc
 >>> import _mysql
 >>> print _mysql.__file__
/myhome/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.3-freebsd-6.1-SECURITY-i386.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
 >>>

it would seem simpler to have the .so files inside the site-packages and there's 
the question of why this folder has to be obfuscated (name starts with .). Even 
if these files are "resources" why should they be assumed to belong to the user? 
I could make the PYTHON folder world usable, but that won't help if I make all 
other things in myhome private. Surely code resources belong in the same area as 
the code that uses them.

Just another nonsense from the eggworld
-- 
Robin Becker