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"JJ" == Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl> writes:

JJ> Some people suggested that for a certain module we only put JJ> "often used" items in __all__, so that "from module import *" JJ> will import only these commonly used items into your JJ> namespace. I hope __all__ isn't just for from-import-* support. If so, maybe we should get rid of most of them in the ongoing quest to actively discourage from-import-* (or better yet, set them to the empty list). -Barry

There's a discussion over on the pyobjc developers mailing list at the moment about the use of __all__.

Some people suggested that for a certain module we only put "often used" items in __all__, so that "from module import *" will import only these commonly used items into your namespace. The module would contain other items which *are* useful and which should be callable from the outside, but these would have to be explicitly imported into your namespace (or used via "import objc; objc.SetVerbose()".

This doesn't feel right to me, as I've always used __all__ to mean "the whole externally visible API", and I've considered anything else that the module exports basically an artefact of the implementation. But when I looked this up in the reference manual it is rather vague about this.

Any opinions on the matter?

__all__ should contain the entire public API. It's mostly intended to avoid accidentally exporting other things you've *imported* like os, sys, and other library modules. Another way of doing that would be to write e.g. import sys as _sys but I don't like excessive underscoring. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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"JJ" == Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl> writes:

JJ> Some people suggested that for a certain module we only put JJ> "often used" items in __all__, so that "from module import *" JJ> will import only these commonly used items into your JJ> namespace. I hope __all__ isn't just for from-import-* support. If so, maybe we should get rid of most of them in the ongoing quest to actively discourage from-import-* (or better yet, set them to the empty list). -Barry

There's a discussion over on the pyobjc developers mailing list at the moment about the use of __all__.

Some people suggested that for a certain module we only put "often used" items in __all__, so that "from module import *" will import only these commonly used items into your namespace. The module would contain other items which *are* useful and which should be callable from the outside, but these would have to be explicitly imported into your namespace (or used via "import objc; objc.SetVerbose()".

This doesn't feel right to me, as I've always used __all__ to mean "the whole externally visible API", and I've considered anything else that the module exports basically an artefact of the implementation. But when I looked this up in the reference manual it is rather vague about this.

Any opinions on the matter?

__all__ should contain the entire public API. It's mostly intended to avoid accidentally exporting other things you've *imported* like os, sys, and other library modules. Another way of doing that would be to write e.g. import sys as _sys but I don't like excessive underscoring. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)