You're welcome! I wasn't trying to discourage you -- I was trying to prompt you to do it the best way, as a third party open source project (perhaps a contributed one to iPython, etc). Brett suggests that the index might be already around somewhere (maybe just for the standard library, but that would be a start) so if you could locate it then the needed excepthook might not be too hard to write, etc, etc. However, it's definitely up to you!
Alex On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Abdallah El Guindy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 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. > > You are definitely right about that, I totally missed this when first > thinking about it... > >> there is absolutely >> nothing to be gained by having the functionality inside the core >> rather than in a third-party package. > > I guess you are right once again. > >> If and when your extension "takes the Python world by storm" > > I guess this is never gonna happen (that's why I probably tagged the feature > minor). > > I did not realized at the beginning that it has as much technical > complications.. Thanks for pointing that out, I'm convinced that perhaps it > is not a good idea after all. > > Thanks. > > On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:35 AM, Alex Martelli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> 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
