On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Abdallah El Guindy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I believe there must be a way... Maybe by creating an index file for each > module. I'm not sure, but I think the number of packages on apt-get is much > more than the number of python built-in modules (obviously I don't know > their number), yet it is doable with the case of apt-get.
Adding a package to the repositories searched by apt-get is a much higher-ceremony operation than copying a file into some sys.path directory or changing sys.path, so that indexing makes sense for apt-get but not for Python's imports -- I can imagine the poor Python interpreter churning away all the time updating the index all the time. And even then, the Python index WOULD still potentially miss some entries, because a Python module is vastly more dynamic than the totally-static repositories used by apt-get, where each package is mandated to very explicitly state what it requires, and what it provides. If you want to try your hand at this kind of extension, I recommend you do it as a pypi package -- since all you want is peculiar messages in response to some NameError or ImportError exceptions, you can hang your functionality neatly into sys.excepthook -- there is absolutely nothing to be gained by having the functionality inside the core rather than in a third-party package. Moreover, I would recommend targeting the extension (solely or primarily) at "rich" environments such as IDLE or ipython (http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/), whose users already expect and obviously appreciate getting especially rich interactive functionality even if it comes at the potential cost of some overhead -- users of the Python built-in interactive interpreter are more likely to be after lean-and-mean functionality instead. If and when your extension "takes the Python world by storm", you will have strong practical arguments to recommend its inclusion in some future version of Python -- its popularity will have proven that there is strong demand for that functionality, after all. Until such support does exist, it's hard to argue for including in the Python core offering something that can be done just as well as a 3rd party package, has no proven demand, AND presents potentially delicate tradeoffs in terms of implementation (is the user going to be asked to explicitly reindex each time they alter sys.path, or is the overhead of the reindexing going to be implicit in ANY alteration at all? etc, etc). Alex _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
