[Import-sig] Kick-off

[Guido van Rossum]

> I guess the first order of business is to establish some 
> objectives. I see two goals (my version of what happend at dev-
> day):
> 
> Short-term: Provide a "new architecture import hooks" module 
> for the standard library. This would deprecate ihooks and 
> friends, and provide developers with a way of learning the new 
> architecture.
> 
> Long-term: Reform the entire import architecture of Python. 
> This affects Python start-up, the semantics of sys.path, and 
> the C API to importing.
> 
> The model for this is, of course, Greg's imputil.py (Greg, your 
> latest version is not yet on your website which still has a 
> November version).
> 
> If this seems like a reasonable statement, I'll massage and 
> expand it into the import SIG's homepage. I'll also try to 
> produce legible downloads of the handouts I passed out at the 
> dev day session.

One addition: at the devday meeting, Michael Reilly objected to the
notion of deprecating ihooks -- he has been using ihooks successfully
to meet his needs.  I think we should think long and hard about
thowing ihooks out -- it may be that the problem is simply that it's
not well documented (actually, undocumented is better :-).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)