[Python-3000] stdlib reorganization

[Talin]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On 5/22/06, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 
>>Yet "array" is not named "arraylib", "calendar" is not named
>>"calendarlib", "email" is not named "emaillib"... Shall I continue? ;)
> 
> 
> Please stop this pointless debate. We all know that the stdlib uses
> many different inconsistent naming conventions. And I admit full
> responsibility for many of those.
> 
> If you want to do something about it, come up with a consistent naming
> convention.

Well, in that case, let me ask this: What would be the general 
parameters / requirements of the re-organization? I mean, any programmer 
can come along and divide up things into categories, but I suspect that 
there are subtler requirements than that.

Here are some examples of some requirements that I can think of:

1) No mass renaming of modules unless there's something seriously wrong 
with the existing name.

2) For most cases, I suspect that you will want to add no more than one 
additional level to the hierarchy. Namespaces will still be fairly flat, 
with large numbers of items per namespace, but not quite as broad and 
flat as they are today. (In other words, avoid deep nesting - we don't 
want to have to type sys.runtime.types.containers.UserDict.UserDict.)

So that people will have something to argue about, I'd suggest the 
following as a top-level category list. Note that only a small amount of 
thought has gone into this :)

    sys - contains the existing sys, plus atexit, site, user, etc.

    rt - runtime modules - gc, fpectl, inspect, etc.

    types - existing types module, mixin types, type predicates.

    persist - marshall, pickle, shelve, etc. Possibly zip and
       maybe ConfigParser

    imp - import machinery - existing imp, zipimport, pkgutil,
       modulefinder

    string - existing string, plus repr, pprint, textwrap, stringprep.
       Possibly fnmatch.

    encoding - codecs, unicodedata
       Example: net.protocols.http

    conversions - data conversion modules - fpformat

    re - regular expressions - unchanged

    collection - existing collections, queue, heapq, array
       Example: collections.array.array

    algorithms - diff, random, whrandom

    testing - doctest, unittest, test, test_support

    math - existing math, decimal, cmath
       Example: math.decimal

    doc - documentation tools - pydoc

    itertools - unchanged

    functional - unchanged

    console - cmd, shlex, curses*, getopt, optparse, readline,
      rlcompleter

    os - existing os plus errno

    os.path - as-is

    os.file - existing os.file plus fileinput, tempfile, filecmp,
      mmap

    os.dir - existing os.dir plus dircache, stat*, glob, shutil

    os.stream - popen*

    os.process - subprocess, signal

    os.socket - existing socket, select

    os.thread - existing threading, mutex

    os.posix - posix-specific

    os.win32 - win32-specific

    os.osx - osx-specific

    locale - unchanged

    logging - unchanged

    platform - unchanged

    compression - zlib, gzip, bz2, etc. (Or perhaps an 'archive'
      module including 'tar'.)

    db - database packages - the various databases, gdbm, bsddb, etc.

    debug - pdb, bdb, etc.

    profile - profiler, hotshot, etc.

    net.protocols - http, imap, pop, ftp, etc.
       Example: net.protocols.http

    net.formats - mail, mime, binhex, etc.
       Example: net.formats.mime

    net.tools - webbrowser, SocketServer, robotparser, etc.

    xml.* - xml-related packages
       Example: xml.sax

    media.audio - audio packages

    media.image - image conversion packages

    rexec - rename to 'restrict' (Too much confusion with 'regex')

    python - python language services (compiler, parser, etc.)


-- Talin