Re: [Python-Dev] PEP 294: Type Names in the types Module

On Tue, Jun 25, 2002, Peter Funk wrote:

Unfortunately this will not help for software, which has already been written and is in production. If in 2004 certain Python programs written in 2000 or earlier would start raising ImportError exceptions on 'from types import *' after upgrading to a new system which may come with the latest version of Python, this will certainly cause damage.

This can be solved by a combination of changing the documentation and using __all__ (which I think is in part precisely the point of creating __all__). (To save people time, __all__ controls what names import * uses; I think it was introduced in Python 2.1, but I'm not sure.)