On 2008-04-11 11:56, Christian Heimes wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg schrieb:
In my experience, Guido has shown that he doesn't get convinced by someone pointing him at a problem - he has to run into the problem himself.
Now, Python is a community project and its user set is very diverse, so I'd like to see what the community thinks. If there's a tie, Guido can break it, but I don't really see why he should be the only one who's being asked.
We had the discussion on the Python general list a while ago. Guido and several other developers were against Java-like namespace packages for the stdlib.
We've had such discussions on and off several times during the past 8-10 years. So far, the only arguments against moving the whole Python std lib under a single package (without deeper nesting) were the following:
* too much to write
* hard to change all the code out there
Now that we're going for a transition from 2.x to 3.x, the second argument no longer applies. 2to3.py can easily change the imports as necessary (just like it will for the stdlib reorg in general).
The first argument is not really a strong one, but more a personal preference. Using a Python package will make it easier for IDEs to provide auto-complete, so over time
On the plus side, we would finally have the freedom to choose any generic name we like for Python modules - without causing problems with existing code outside the std lib, e.g. all the *lib modules could have the "lib" removed.
And you can finally see whether a module came from the Python std lib or some other source right in the source file. Accidental sys.path overrides will no longer happen.
If I've missed any arguments against the py-package idea, please let me know.
Thanks,