[Import-SIG] Suggested example/use case for PEP 402's extensible packages

[Barry Warsaw]

Brilliant insight, Nick.

We might even want to reserve the `backports` name in the stdlib exactly for
this purpose.

-Barry

On Aug 26, 2011, at 09:44 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>When Tarek asked for help with the packaging->distutils2 backport, the
>question came up as to *why* the backport was being distributed under
>a different name. The rationale put forward was that it allowed the
>future 3.4 version to be backported to 3.3 without conflicting with
>the standard library version. A similar convention is already in place
>for backports like unittest -> unittest2 and it seems to work well in
>practice, despite being somewhat ugly.
>
>In a world with extensible (virtual) packages, as proposed by PEP 402,
>it would be straightforward to instead adopt a namespace convention
>for such standard lib backports, such as "backports.packaging" and
>"backports.unittest" rather than having to mangle the name of the
>package itself. With the standard import mechanism properly on
>sys.meta_path (as it should be in 3.3), it would even be possible to
>define a meta importer that checked for such backports automatically
>if the ordinary import process failed.
>
>Obviously, this is a far future kind of thing, only feasible when 3.3
>is the oldest version a backport wants to support, rather than the
>newest, but I like it as an example of what extensible package
>namespaces allows.