On May 21, 11:11am, Fred L. Drake wrote:

Subject: [Distutils] Re: [PSA MEMBERS] packages in Python

Konrad Hinsen writes:

...

Shouldn't that be the other way round? I'd expect to be able to override general modules by platform-specific modules.

Greg Ward and I were talking about this stuff the other day, and I think we decided that there was no good way to have multiple implementations of a module installed such that the platform dependent version was sure to take precedence over a platform independent version; this relies on the sequence of directories in the relevant search path (whether it be sys.path or a package's __path__). The general solution seems to be that two things need to be done: a package's __path__ needs to include *all* the appropriate directories found along the search path, not just the one holding __init__.py*, AND the platform dependent modules should have different names from the platform independent modules. The platform independent module should be the public interface, and it can load platform dependent code the same way that string loads functions from strop. The problem here is that the package's __path__ is not being created this way now; if anyone has time to work on a patch for Python/import.c, I'd be glad to help test it! ;-)

I take care of this in my extension module. If I have a platform dependent implementation of a module I: try: import extension Fail: use common This requires minimal amount of coding. Personally I did not see the need of this being automatic -Michel