Odd files; just left behind?

[Robert Kern]

Robin Becker wrote:
> 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?

They're a cache.

> 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?

Because they are unpacked at runtime by the user that imported the module.
Usually, they won't have write access to site-packages.

> 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.

Well, you can't import a .so from a zip file. Thus they need to be placed
somewhere else. Don't worry about making ~/.python-eggs world readable. When
other users import the package, they will have the .so's unpacked, too.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco