[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Michael Foord
<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> On 09/11/2010 22:09, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> The new unittest package in 2.7 and 3.2 also uses it in the module
>> __init__ to present the old "flat" namespace despite become a package
>> under the hood.
>
> Look again. :-)
>
> Benjamin did the refactoring into a package and he obviously dislikes
> "import *" as much as me. If he had used "import *" I would have changed it
> anyway, but he didn't.
>
> We also define a __all__ to make the exported names explicit.

Fair cop :)

(and in that particular case, the maintenance burden in being explicit
is minimal, since new top-level names in unittest are going to be
significantly more rare than new methods on existing unittest classes)

Even some of the acceleration modules (such as _hashlib) use
approaches that are more explicit than using "import *". The point at
least stands for the cases where the pure Python version is largely
agnostic as to exactly which names the acceleration module overrides.
It's a very, very niche use case though, so the default position of
"if you use a star import anywhere other than at the interactive
prompt, you're most like wrong to do so" is still a reasonable stance
to take :)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia