In the past it was common practice to %ghost .pyo files in order to save a small amount of space on the users filesystem. However, this has two issues: 1. With SELinux, if a user is running python -O [APP] it will try to write the .pyos when they don't exist. This leads to AVC denial records in the logs. 2. If the system administrator runs python -OO [APP] the .pyos will get created with no docstrings. Some programs require docstrings in order to function. On subsequent runs with python -O [APP] python will use the cached .pyos even though a different optimization level has been requested. The only way to fix this is to find out where the .pyos are and delete them.
The current method of dealing with pyo files is to include them as is, no %ghosting.