Comment by zahlman

> On an image you obviously want to do it at bake time

It seems like tons of people are creating container images with an installer tool and having it do a bunch of installations, rather than creating the image with the relevant Python packages already in place. Hard to understand why.

For that matter, a pre-baked Python install could do much more interesting things to improve import times than just leaving a forest of `.pyc` files in `__pycache__` folders all over the place.