I run into this kind of problem when switching back and forth between running things directly on my laptop and running them as a mounted volume in a container, since the permissions and SELinux labels on the cache can get messed up.

However, in those cases, writing back to the cache will also fail (since it's a "those are not your files, hands off" permissions problem).

So I'd be a fan of downgrading problems with the .pyc cache to warnings in general - if we read it and that fails, OK, we'll revert to using the source. If we try to write it, and that fails, well that's potentially OK too - writing to the cache is to speed up the *next* invocation of the module, and whether or not we actually care about that is going to be situational.