Tim Peters wrote:
(snip)
As is, the package name used by a release is part of its published interface. You can't change it without causing pain, any more than you can make incompatible changes to public class methods or input-output behavior. In return, package clients are uniform, simple and portable, making life easiest for the people who know least. The burden is on package authors to choose names wisely, and that's where the burden should be.
Not all packages are part of the external interface. In fact, all Zope names are essentially internal, since Zope is an application. The issue is not so much access to access from outside as it is access between packages within Zope. Further, the current support for relative imports allows a package to be moved into another package without breaking the pulic interface wrt the containing package. Here's an example that I hope will be motivating: Suppose Marc-Andre has a package mx with subpackages DateTime and stringtools. If mx was installed in the Python path then a module in the mx.DateTime package could get at stringtools like: import mx.stringtools So far, so good. Zope has a notion of products which are *self contained* packages that are sub-packages of the Products package. So, suppose someone wants to write a NiftyDB product, which is a Zope product that provides access to an external database. Now the author of the NiftyDB product wants to use the mx package. The mx package is not a standard part of Zope, or of Python, so they simpley include it in the NiftyDB product directory. Becase relative imports are allowed in the current import scheme, they can use mx as usual. A NiftyDB module can import DateTime as follows: import mx.DateTime So even though mx is istalled as a sub-package, the public interface is unchanged, at least wrt the containing package. Unfortunately, the internal import of stringtools in the DateTime package: import mx.stringtools will fail, because mx is no longer a top-level module. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@digicool.com Python Powered! Technical Director (888) 344-4332 http://www.python.org Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com http://www.zope.org Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.