At 04:33 PM 1/6/2008 +0100, Christian Heimes wrote:
Hello!
We are discussing name space packages on the stdlib reorg list. For Python 3.0 we plan to organize the packages by purpose, e.g. put all database related packages like sqlite and shelve in a 'databases' name space.
Of course we want to have the name spaces extensible by 3rd party software. The Python world as currently two ways to create extensible name space packages: pkgutil and pkg_resource.
pkgutil is part of Python 2.5. pkg_resource is scheduled for Python 2.6 and 3.0 in PEP 365 [1]. The PEP hasn't been accepted yet.
Questions:
* PJE: Is pkg_resource ready for Python 2.6 and 3.0?
The extra feature proposed in PEP 365 isn't done yet. Without the PEP acceptance, I didn't feel the need to rush on finishing it. Apart from that, the pkg_resources module has been pretty darn stable.
* GvR: Are you going to accept Phillip's PEP?
* PJE: Does pkg_resource have an easy way to overwrite a package in a name space package?
OverRIDE, yes; overWRITE, no.
E.g. an user wants to overwrite Python's databases.sqlite with a newer version of sqlite. Can he simply do it by inserting a package into sys.path before Lib/ ?
As long as the 'databases' package hasn't been imported or had its namespace declared yet, yes. (I'm making the assumption, of course, that all of the namespace package requirements have been met: i.e., each package has a database/__init__.py that contains a namespace declaration and nothing else.)