[Python-ideas] Module aliases and/or "real names"

[Nick Coghlan]

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Ron Adam <rrr at ronadam.com> wrote:
> You could add a private dictionary to sys, that is updated along with
> sys.modules, which maps module names to real names.  And have a function in
> inspect to retrieve the real name for an object.
>
> That sounds like it would do pretty much what you need and doesn't add a top
> level builtin or global, or change "if __name__ == '__main__': main()".

My original suggestion was along those lines, but I've come to the
conclusion that it isn't sufficiently granular - when existing code
tinkers with "__module__" it tends to do it at the object level rather
than by modifying __name__ in the module globals.

To turn this into a concrete proposal, here is what I am thinking of
specifying in a PEP for 3.3:

1. Implicit configuration of __module__ attributes is updated to check
for a definition of "__import_name__" at the module level. If found,
then this is used as the value for the __module__ attribute.
Otherwise, __module__ is set to __name__ as usual.

2. Any code that currently sets a __module__ attribute (i.e. function
and class definitions) will also set an __impl_module__ attribute.
This attribute will always be set to the value of __name__.

3. Update and/or augment the relevant C APIs to make it easy to do
this for affected extension modules

4. Update inspect.getsource() (and possibly some other introspection
functions) to look at __impl_module__ rather than __module__

5. Update all acceleration (such as _datetime) and "implementation
packages" (such as unittest) to set __module__ and __impl_module__
appropriately on exported objects

6. Update the __main__ execution logic (including both the builtin
logic and runpy) to insert the __main__ module into sys.modules as
both "__main__" and the module's real name (i.e. the name that would
result in a second copy of the module ending up in sys.modules if you
imported it)

7. Update the __main__ execution logic to set __import_name__ to the
actual name of the module.

So we end up with two new magic attributes:

__import_name__: optional module level attribute that indicates a
preferred alternative to __name__ for accessing the module. contents.
Alters the value of __module__ for classes and functions defined in
the module. Implicitly set for the __main__ module.
__impl_module__: implicitly set on objects with a __module__ attribute
to allow __module__ to be altered to refer to an object's preferred
import location without losing the actual implementation location of
the object

Cheers,
Nick.

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