On Oct 20, 2014 8:25 PM, "Robert Collins" <robertc@robertcollins.net> wrote:
>
> I want to make the improvements in unittest (which transitively
> includes mock and traceback and perhaps inspect ...) available for
> folk that can't use 3.5 yet.
>
> We've currently got the unittest2 and mock as modules on pypi, and
> clearly we can add another e.g. traceback2 as a way to get the
> traceback changes out there.
>
> I'm wondering though if perhaps putting up a namespace package on pypi
> for things in the stdlib - e.g. 'stdlib' (or stdlib2 or something)
> would make sense. In particular that might permit relative imports to
> automatically pick up the other also backported modules without source
> changes.
>
> So we'd have e.g.
> stdlib.unittest
> stdlib.traceback
> stdlib.mock
>
> And then using that would be done through the normal
>
> try:
>     from stdlib import unitest
> except ImportError:
>     import unittest
>
> dance.
>
> -Rob

There are several packages already named backports.{{module}}. I think they all use the same namespace too. They're also all maintained by people not working on the stdlib. For example, backports.ssl is an attempt to backport python 3's ssl features to python 2 using pyOpenSSL