[Python-Dev] Matching __all__ to doc: bugfix or enhancement?

[Guido van Rossum]

So it's a new feature, albeit a small one. I do see that it shouldn't
be backported, but I don't see any worries about doing it in 3.4.
Adding new functions/classes/constants to modules happens all the
time, and we never give a second thought to users of import *. :-)

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>>
>> The timeit doc describes four public attributes.
>> The current timeit.__all__ only lists one.
>> http://bugs.python.org/issue17414
>> proposes to expand __all__ to include all four:
>> -__all__ = ["Timer"]
>> +__all__ = ["Timer", "timeit", "repeat", "default_timer"]
>>
>> The effect of the change is
>> a) help(timit) will mention the three functions as well as the class;
>> b) IDLE's attribute completion box* will list all four instead just Timer;
>> c) unknow other users of .__all__ will see the expanded list, for better
>> or worse.
>>
>
> Another effect is that existing code that does:
>
> from timeit import *
>
> May break. The above may not be the recommended best practice in Python, but
> it's perfectly valid and widely used.
>
> Eli
>
>
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--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)