[Import-SIG] PEP 395 (Module aliasing) and the namespace PEPs

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Umm, if people screw up their filesystem layouts and *lie* to the
> interpreter about whether or not something is a package, how is that
> our fault? "Oh, they told me something, but they might not mean it, so
> I'll choose to ignore the information they've given me" is the part
> that sounds like guessing to me.
>

Er, what?

They're not lying, they just made a mistake -- a mistake that could've
occurred at any point during a project's development, which would then only
surface later.

As I said, I've seen projects where people had unnecessary __init__.py
files floating around -- mainly because at some point they were trying any
and everything to get package imports to work correctly, and somewhere
along the line decided to just put __init__.py files everywhere just to be
"sure" that things would work.  (i.e. the sort of behavior PEP 402 is
supposed to make unnecessary.)


If we error *immediately*, telling them what's wrong with their
> filesystem, that's the *opposite* of guessing.
>

I'm all in favor of warning or erroring out on aliasing __main__ or
relative imports from __main__.  It's silently *succeeding* in doing
something that might not have been intended on the basis of coincidental
__init__.py placement that I have an issue with.

There exist projects that *intentionally* alias their modules as both a
package and non-package (*cough* PIL *cough*), to name just *one* kind of
*intentionally* weird sys.path setups, not counting unintentional ones like
I mentioned.  The simple fact is that you cannot unambiguously determine
the intended meaning of a given script, and you certainly can't do it
*before* the script executes (because it might already be doing some
sys.path munging of its own.

Saying that people who made one kind of mistake or intentional change are
lying, while a different set of people making mistakes deserve to have
their mistake silently corrected doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
 But even if I granted that people with extra __init__.py's floating around
should be punished for this (and I don't), this *still* wouldn't magically
remove the existing ambiguity-of-intention in today's Python projects.
 Without some way for people to explicitly declare their intention (e.g.
explicitly setting __qname__), you really have no way to definitely
establish what the user's *intention* is.  (Especially since the user who
wrote the code and the user trying to use it might be different people....
 and sys.path might've been set up by yet another party.)

IOW, it's ambiguous already, today, with or without 382, 402, or any other
new PEP.  (Heck, it was ambiguous before PEP 302 came around!)
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