[Import-SIG] What if namespace imports weren't special?

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> Why would we need the .pyp files, if we already have the __package__
> subdir? Isn't the existence of the subdir enough?
>
> The only reason I can think of is for mercurial, which doesn't like
> empty directories. But then the file could be anything, and python would
> never look for it. For tools like RPM the files in the subdir would need
> to be unique per-RPM, but I don't think that's Python's concern.

For the reasons you say - empty directories aren't handled well by
many tools and if the directory is going to have content, then
*somebody* has to define the rules for playing well with others, so it
may as well be us.

However, I wrote this before reading PJE's last piece about virtual
packages. If that idea pans out (and I personally haven't spotted any
problems with it as yet) then we won't need a marker system at all, so
the point will become moot.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia