[Distutils] Adding entry points into Distutils ?

[Noah Gift]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 7:18 AM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 08:28 PM 5/6/2009 +0200, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
>>
>> Doug Hellmann wrote:
>> > On May 6, 2009, at 1:46 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:
>> >
>> >> At 10:59 AM 5/6/2009 -0400, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> On May 5, 2009, at 10:50 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> At 12:03 PM 5/6/2009 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>> >>>>> I don't see any advantage, in the context of this discussion, to
>> >>>>> having an additional, incompatible naming for full-path-to-a-class.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Setuptools doesn't limit an entry point to being a class, function,
>> >>>> or other top-level name within a module.  It can be a method of a
>> >>>> class, or an attribute of an attribute.  The ':' removes any
>> >>>> ambiguity as to which part of the name is the module, and which
>> >>>> parts are attributes within that module.
>> >>>
>> >>> Is that level of complexity useful in practice?  I can understand how
>> >>> it came to be implemented, but is it actually used by any projects?
>> >>
>> >> I use it; I'm not sure who else does.
>> >>
>> >> The particular use case I have (and that's most likely to be shared)
>> >> is that the calling app or framework wants a callable or function, but
>> >> the providing app or library implements that callable as a classmethod
>> >> for convenience.
>> >
>> > That's pretty much what I expected.  It feels a little messy to have
>> > plugins exposing "internals" like that but not so much so that I propose
>> > we don't allow it. The ":" syntax seems like the right way to go.
>>
>> I'd be tempted to call this an edge-case. You should be able to expose
>> the internal detail you'd need via a module scope alias for the
>> particular case. That seems easier than providing a whole new notion.
>
> Ah, now you reminded me of a forgotten detail: the specific use case was
> that I had a library with a Command class that was widely used as a base
> class; simply adding a classmethod to that base class allowed all the
> existing classes to be used as plugins without any change to their modules'
> source code: the entry points just always reference the classmethod.

[slightly off topic]
It seems like registration is the canonical use case for classmethods
in Python no?  Tarek has a good example in Expert Python Programming
of this in his observer example.
[/end]


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-- 
Cheers,

Noah