[Python-Dev] 3.5 unittest does not support namespace packages for discovering (original) (raw)

Ned Batchelder ned at nedbatchelder.com
Thu Mar 23 16:41:01 EDT 2017

On 3/23/17 3:14 PM, Robert Collins wrote:

On 24 March 2017 at 04:59, INADA Naoki <songofacandy at gmail.com> wrote:

And this issue is relating to it too: http://bugs.python.org/issue29716

In short, "namespace package" is for make it possible to pip install_ _foobar foobaz, when foobar provides foo.bar and foobaz provides foo.baz package. (foo is namespace package). If unittests searches normal directly, it may walk deep into very large tree containing millions of directories. I don't like it. That is a risk, OTOH I think the failure to do what folk expect is a bigger risk.

The issue here is, what do folks expect? PEP 420 is pretty clear on its purpose. The first sentence of the abstract:

Namespace packages are a mechanism for splitting a single Python package across multiple directories on disk.

And the first sentence of the specification:

Regular packages will continue to have an init.py and will reside in a single directory.

PEP 420 is not meant to make all init.py files optional. It has a specific purpose. These proposed changes are not in support of that purpose. We should not bend over backwards to support getting rid of init.py files just because people don't like empty init.py files. That's not what PEP 420 is for.

--Ned.

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