[Python-Dev] Dropping init.py requirement for subpackages (original) (raw)

Clark C. Evans cce at clarkevans.com
Tue Jun 20 16:36:21 CEST 2006

+1 Excellent Change +1 Minimal Backward Compatibility Difficulties

I think this would also help quite a bit with newbie adoption of Python. I've had to explain this un-feature on numerous occassions and it given how smart Python is, I've wondered why it has this requirement. If you look in various open source packages, you'll find that 95% of these init.py files are empty. The ones at my work actually say:

stupid Python requirement, don't remove this file

Why? Someone decided to remove files of length 0 in our repository without realizing the consequences. Since it had the init.pyc file around, it still worked... till one brought down a fresh copy of the repository and then it just "stopped" working. Quite a bit of hair pulling that one caused us.

The only case where this might cause a problem is with "resource" directories that only contain ".html", ".jpg" and other files. So, perhpas this feature would only turn a directory into a package if it didn't have any .py files. It could also trigger only when the package is explicitly imported?

Good luck /w the pitch-fork wielding users and telling the old-timers where they can keep their backward compatibility.

Clark

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