[PEAK] eggs with individual .pth's

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:07 PM 10/12/2005 -0700, Rob Cakebread wrote:
>Would using individual .pth files be a problem as far as using
>easy_install as a query tool or breaking other features it may have?

The impacts are:

1. Slower Python startup time, since Python must open and read all .pth files

2. Some packages may not be overrideable via easy-install.pth, as .pth 
files are read alphabetically.  (You could work around this by using names 
like vendor-foopackage.pth, which would then allow easy-install.pth to 
override them)

The final choice is up to you, of course, but I would tend to go with the 
single .pth file if possible, although it might be reasonable to use a 
'vendor.pth' or 'portage.pth' file instead of easy-install.pth.  Setuptools 
itself uses this notion of a "backup" .pth file that allows setuptools 
itself to still function if it is removed from easy-install.pth.