On 16/07/13 20:28, Richard Oudkerk wrote:
On 16/07/2013 6:44am, Nick Coghlan wrote:
Clarifying what constitutes an internal interface in a way that doesn't require renaming anything is a necessary prerequisite for bundling or bootstrapping the pip CLI in Python 3.4 (as pip exposes its internal implemetnation API as "import pip" rather than "import _pip" and renaming it would lead to a lot of pointless code churn). Without that concern, the topic never would have come up.
BTW, how does the use of __all__ effect things? Somewhere I got the idea that if a module uses __all__ then anything not listed is internal. I take it that is wrong?
That is not how I interpret __all__. In the absence of any explicit documentation, I interpret __all__ as nothing more than a list of names which wildcard imports will bring in, without necessarily meaning that other names are private. For example, I might have a module explicitly designed for wildcard imports at the interactive interpreter: from module import * brings in the functions which I expect will be useful interactively, not necessarily the entire public API. For example, pkgutil includes classes with single-underscore methods, which I take as private. It also has a function simplegeneric, which is undocumented and not listed in __all__. In in the absence of even a comment saying "Don't use this", I take it as an oversight, not policy that simplegeneric is private. -- Steven