[Import-SIG] My objections to implicit package directories

[PJ Eby]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 11:49 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> So the only backwards incompatibility is that "import foo" may succeed
> where it previously failed if there is a directory foo/ somewhere on
> sys.path but no foo.py and no foo/__init__.py anywhere. I don't think
> this is a big deal.
>

Actually, it *is* a big deal.  An early draft of PEP 402 was like the
newly-proposed approach, and it was shot down by an *actual code sample
from a real package* that somebody posted to show the problem.  The
motivating example is actually presented in the PEP: trying to "import
json" with a json/ directory present -- and the "json" package *not*
present -- and then trying to use its contents.  The PEP works around this
by taking the namespace concept to its logical extreme and saying you can
only import the *contents* of the namespace, because the namespace itself
doesn't exist.  (i.e., it's virtual.)

tl;dr version: the killer problem with allowing "import foo" to succeed is
that code which does try/except ImportError to test for a package's
presence will get false positives.  That's the motivating reason for only
allowing sub-namespace package imports to succeed: it prevents the
immediate breakage of real code, the moment the feature is introduced.  :-(
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/import-sig/attachments/20120314/1a43829f/attachment.html>