[Distutils] multiversioning __import__ and modules?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanegomi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>    I realize this may not look like a distutils question, but it's
> closely tied to distutils and setuptools.
>    I did some exploring today and it appears that there isn't a
> simple way to profile different versioned packages and bootstrap one
> version as the master version without going through the trouble of
> implementing a lot of what virtualenv does.
>    What I thought might be a good idea (and I'm just tossing it out
> to see what others might think), is to apply logic to __import__ that
> is similar to setuptools.pkg_resources.require() when importing
> packages. Here's the new API I was thinking of:
>
>    __import__(name[, globals[, locals[, fromlist[,
> level][,version=None][,requires=expr]]]]])¶
>
>    expr can be anything of the form described under
> <http://docs.python.org/distutils/setupscript.html#relationships-between-distributions-and-packages>:
>
>    Here are some explicit examples using the new API:
>
>    1. PackageA v2.0 requires PackageB v1.5:
>
>    __import__('PackageA', version="2.0", requires="PackageB==1.5")
>
>    2. PackageC v2.1 requires any PackageD version between v1.6 and
> v1.8, minus v1.7 (buggy version):
>
>    __import__('PackageC', version="2.1", requires="PackageD >=1.6,
> !=1.7, <=1.8")
>
>    3. PackageE v0.1.0 requires any PackageF version less than v0.1.10:
>
>    __import__('PackageE', version="0.1.0", requires="PackageF<0.1.10")
>
>    4. PackageG requires any version of PackageH:
>
>    __import__('PackageG', requires="PackageH")
>
>    Thoughts?
> Thanks,
> -Garrett
>

Sorry... I lost track of my original bright idea until now. What I
meant was something more along the lines of:

__import__(name[, globals[, locals[, fromlist[,level][,version=None]]]]])¶

The modified examples:

1. Importer requires PackageA v1.5:

__import__('PackageA', version="==1.5")

2. Importer requires any version of PackageB between v1.6 and v1.8,
minus v1.7 (buggy version):

__import__('PackageB', version=">=1.6, !=1.7, <=1.8")

3. Importer requires any PackageC version less than v0.1.10:

__import__('PackageC', version="<0.1.10")

4. Importer requires any version of PackageD:

__import__('PackageD')

Thanks,
-Garrett