[Python-Dev] Enhancing the shutil module (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Mon Jan 18 14:57:49 CET 2010

On 18/01/2010 13:46, Doug Hellmann wrote:

On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:34 AM, Masklinn wrote:

On 18 Jan 2010, at 13:40 , Nick Coghlan wrote:

Tarek Ziadé wrote: There's one remaining external call for "zip" done if the zip module is not found, but I am happy to remove it and throw an exception if it's not found, and keep the external "zip" call on Distutils side, so shutil stays 100% stdlib-powered. +1 for that approach. These changes all sound like nice additions to shutil, and hooray for every module that gets adopted by an active maintainer :) Isn't it a bit weird to include that to shutil though? shutil advertises itself as "a number of high-level operations on files and collections of files."

Well - isn't what's being proposed "a number of high-level operations on files and collections of files." ?

and from what I understood it was a bunch of shell-type utility functions

like tar and zip? :-)

to easily copy, move or remove files and directories (that's pretty much all there is in it at this time).

I don't think the additions are out of place prima-facie.

Wouldn't it make more sense to put those "archive utils" functions/objects in a new module separate from shutil, dealing specifically with cross-archive APIs and linked from the current archive-specific modules (essentially, just take the current archiveutil, move it to the toplevel of the stdlib and maybe rename it)? It would also make the module much easier to find when searching through the module listing, I think. +1

Proliferation of modules is itself a bad thing though.

Michael

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