[Python-Dev] Re: python package

[François Pinard]

[Guido van Rossum]

> And this would be a good time to end this thread. :-)

Agreed.  Yet, allow me for a tiny suggestion, that could solve the stated
problem at a simple cost.  Suffice to choose, then announce a convention
about a set of names which the Python distribution agrees to never use.

It could be anything.  Like, Python could guarantee that it will never
ever install a standard module with a name starting with capital `W', say.
If a user wants to make absolutely sure his/her module does not and will
not conflict with a standard module, just prepend a `W' to its name.
It is likely that people will rarely resort to this convention, but it
will be there for the paranoid, and should be easy to support.  Yet, it
will not solve the paranoia of users against the package name of each other.

If we have been many years ago, the convention I would have preferred is that
Python never uses any capital letter as the first letter of a module, but it
seems to be a little late for this, and I'm not so sure of the benefit. :-)

The most python could say from some `from python import ...' or a `W'
convention is that it gets itself out of the name fight between users, it
does not participate into it.  it does not really solve the problem, anyway.

I guess you are right, in that whatever the direction taken, this thread is
probably doomed to fall into various dead-ends.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard