[Python-Dev] Module renaming and pickle mechanisms (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon May 19 21:41:19 CEST 2008

On 2008-05-19 21:26, Brett Cannon wrote:

It is possible to make pickle aware of the module renames, but that doesn't solve problems with other forms of serialization or use of the .module attribute in general.

Why can't we just provide a "from future import renamedmodules" which then provides all the new name to old name mappings in some form (e.g. module proxies or whatever) and leave the existing modules in 2.x untouched ? I have started a discussion on the stdlib SIG on how to handle this, so I will defer this discussion to there.

Thanks.

But one thing that needs to be decided is if we are ever going to allow ourselves to rename modules without a major version bump, and if so how to deal with this problem. I would hope we don't have to wait another eight years before there is another chance to shift things around if it becomes apparent that some new package should be introduced since 2to3 gives us a very nice way to handle the mechanical aspect of porting code.

We could some kind of module aliasing support to Python.

Backporting name changes would then be a matter of loading the right aliasing map into the older Python version.

This could probably be done by adding a line

if hasattr(sys, 'module_aliases'): modname = sys.module_aliases.get(modname, modname)

to the import implementation.

By turning .module into a property and applying the same aliasing there, we should be able to resolve most technical issues with a renaming.

Alas, too late to change 2.4 and 2.5 :-/

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