At 05:03 PM 8/12/2011 -0400, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
Are there any rules about passing invalid identifiers to __import__ though, or is that just less likely? :)
I suppose you have a point there. ;-)
I still like the idea of a 'marker' file. It would be great if there were a new marker like "__package__.py".
Having any required marker file makes separately-installable portions of a package impossible, since it would then be in conflict at installation time. The (semi-)competing proposal, PEP 382, is based on allowing each portion to have a differently-named marker; we came up with PEP 402 as a way to get rid of the need for any marker files (not to mention the bikeshedding involved.)
What do you mean "building of a virtual path"?
Constructing the __path__-to-be of a not-yet-imported virtual package. The PEP defines a protocol for constructing this, by asking the importer objects to provide __path__ entries, and it does not require anything to be imported. So there's no reason to re-implement the algorithm yourself.
The more that this can focus on module-walking without executing code, the happier I'll be :).
Virtual packages actually improve on this situation, in that a virtual path can be computed without the need to import the package. (Assuming a submodule or subpackage doesn't munge the __path__, of course.)