[Python-Dev] Enhancing the shutil module

[Masklinn]

On 18 Jan 2010, at 13:40 , Nick Coghlan wrote:
> 
> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> There's one remaining external call for "zip" done if the zip module
>> is not found, but I am happy to remove it and throw an exception if
>> it's not found, and keep the external "zip" call on Distutils side, so
>> shutil stays 100% stdlib-powered.
> 
> +1 for that approach. These changes all sound like nice additions to
> shutil, and hooray for every module that gets adopted by an active
> maintainer :)

Isn't it a bit weird to include that to shutil though? shutil advertises itself as "a number of high-level operations on files and collections of files." and from what I understood it was a bunch of shell-type utility functions to easily copy, move or remove files and directories (that's pretty much all there is in it at this time).

Wouldn't it make more sense to put those "archive utils" functions/objects in a new module separate from shutil, dealing specifically with cross-archive APIs and linked from the current archive-specific modules (essentially, just take the current archive_util, move it to the toplevel of the stdlib and maybe rename it)? It would also make the module much easier to find when searching through the module listing, I think.