[Python-Dev] PEP 382: Namespace Packages (original) (raw)

P.J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Apr 15 02:32:34 CEST 2009

At 10:59 PM 4/14/2009 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

You are missing the point: When breaking up a large package that lives in site-packages into smaller distribution bundles, you don't need namespace packages at all, so the PEP doesn't apply.

The way this works is by having a base distribution bundle that includes the needed init.py file and a set of extension bundles the add other files to the same directory (without including another copy of init.py). The extension bundles include a dependency on the base package to make sure that it always gets installed first.

If we're going to keep that practice, there's no point to having the PEP: all three methods (base+extensions, pkgutil, setuptools) all work just fine as they are, with no changes to importing or the stdlib.

In particular, without the feature of being able to drop that practice, there would be no reason for setuptools to adopt the PEP. That's why I'm -1 on your proposal: it's actually inferior to the methods we already have today.

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