[Python-Dev] Re: Christmas Wishlist (original) (raw)

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fred at zope.com
Mon Dec 15 15:51:27 EST 2003

Barry Warsaw writes:

Jim uses the term "pure container package" to describe top-level packages that contain no real content in the package except subpackages. "zope" and "zodb" are examples of this in Zope 3. IWBNI Python had better/easier support for weaving together pure container package contents where subdirectories live in different locations on the file system.

+1

The .pth files processed by site.py support two interesting kinds of lines:

The later alone is interesting enough, since it allows arbitrary initialization code to run when the import is executed. This still happens before all the .pth files have been processed; I suspect we really want the container package to be a little more flexible than that, at least allowing their path to be computed after all .pth files have been processed.

Perhaps it would be nice to have a hook (probably in sys) that gets called after site/sitecustomize are done? A "pure container package" could use a .pth file using "import mypackage", and the package's init.py would register a hook function in sys that searches sys.path for whatever directories should be used in mypackage.path. This also avoids the code being too specific to one way of thinking about packages.

-Fred

-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. PythonLabs at Zope Corporation

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