How to guard against bugs like this one?

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/2/2010 9:13 AM, kj wrote:

>> As for fixing it, unfortunately it's not quite so simple to fix without
>> breaking backwards-compatibility. The opportunity to do so for Python 3.0
>> was missed.
>
> This last point is to me the most befuddling of all.  Does anyone
> know why this opportunity was missed for 3.0?  Anyone out there
> with the inside scoop on this?  Was the fixing of this problem
> discussed in some PEP or some mailing list thread?  (I've tried
> Googling this but did not hit on the right keywords to bring up
> the deliberations I'm looking for.)

There was a proposal to put the whole stdlib into a gigantic package, so 
that

import itertools

would become, for instance

import std.itertools.

Guido rejected that. I believe he both did not like it and was concerned 
about making upgrade to 3.x even harder. The discussion was probably on 
the now closed py3k list.

Terry Jan Reedy