[Python-Dev] If you shadow a module in the standard library that IDLE depends on, bad things happen

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 at 09:00 Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:

>
> see the following:
> lac at smartwheels:~/junk$ echo "print ('hello there')" >string.py
> lac at smartwheels:~/junk$ idle-python3.5
> hello there
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/run.py", line 10, in <module>
>     from idlelib import CallTips
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/CallTips.py", line 16, in <module>
>     from idlelib.HyperParser import HyperParser
>   File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/HyperParser.py", line 14, in <module>
>     _ASCII_ID_CHARS = frozenset(string.ascii_letters + string.digits + "_")
> AttributeError: module 'string' has no attribute 'ascii_letters'
>
> IDLE then produces a popup that says:
>
> IDLE's subprocess didn't make connection.  Either IDLE can't stat a
> subprocess por personal firewall software is blocking the connection. <ok>
>
> --------
>
> I think that life would be a whole lot easier for people if instead we got
> a message:
>
> Warning: local file /u/lac/junk/string.py shadows module named string in
> the
> Standard Library
>
> I think that it is python exec that would have to do this -- though of
> course the popup could also warn about shadowing in general, instead of
> sending people on wild goose chases over their firewalls.
>
> Would this be hard to do?
>

It would require a custom importer or overriding __import__ but it's
doable.
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