[New-bugs-announce] [issue3589] Misleading names for multiprocessing "convenience" functions

[Nick Coghlan]

New submission from Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:

The package level imports from the new multiprocessing package exhibit
some very strange behaviour because they are actually functions
pretending to be classes:

Python 2.6b1+ (trunk:64945, Jul 14 2008, 20:00:46)
[GCC 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import multiprocessing as mp
>>> isinstance(mp.Lock(), mp.Lock)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: isinstance() arg 2 must be a class, type, or tuple of classes
and types
>>> mp.Lock.__name__
'Lock'
>>> mp.Lock.__module__
'multiprocessing'
>>> mp.Lock().__class__.__name__
'Lock'
>>> mp.Lock().__class__.__module__
'multiprocessing.synchronize'

The delayed import functions in multiprocessing.__init__ look like a
serious misfeature to me. I'd be inclined to replace them with "from
.synchronize import *" and "from .process import *" (leaving anything
which isn't covered by those two imports to be retrieved directly from
the relevant mp submodule)

----------
assignee: jnoller
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 71327
nosy: jnoller, ncoghlan
priority: critical
severity: normal
status: open
title: Misleading names for multiprocessing "convenience" functions
versions: Python 2.6, Python 3.0

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue3589>
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