In recent PEP 451-related discussions, the subject of reloading has come up multiple times. Most recently, PJE suggested that reload semantics are under-specified (and under-tested). [1][2] It may be worth adding a dedicated section on reloading to the reference doc. As evidenced by that email thread (and issue #19413), there are some reload semantics that should be specified (and tested) but aren't. While reload has a less prominent place in Python 3 (no longer a builtin), it is still a long-standing feature of the import system which gets used at more than just the interactive prompt. I'd hate to see more issues like 19413 pop up later because of under-specification. Furthermore, it would likely help other implementations pre-3.3 (a.k.a. pre-importlib) cover reload corner cases. [1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2013-October/129868.html [2] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2013-October/129971.html
Thanks for checking in, Cheryl! Clearly no one picked up this banner. :) Furthermore, I'm not aware of any reload-related complaints coming from the community. I know of only a couple major use cases for reload(): refresh parts of a running app during development and reload a config (e.g. SIGHUP). Those use cases seem to be mostly stable. Given ~4.5 years of zero activity here, I think it's safe to say nothing further is going to happen. :) So I'm closing this issue. At this point I don't see much value in keeping it open. If someone later finds a concrete motivator for more detail about module-reloading in the language reference (or decide they want to drive this effort) then they can re-open this issue (or create a new one) at that point.
