[IPython-dev] IPython module and package reorganization

[Darren Dale]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Brian Granger<ellisonbg.net at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I would love to be able to type "ipython" rather than "IPython" all
> > the time so I am for this change.  What do others think?  Are there
> > problems with this that I am missing?
>
> I personally would *love* to do this now.  I remember pulling back
> from this change a long time ago when we realized the problem on
> OSX/Windows because of name clashes.
>
> One aspect of this change does worry me though: there's a LOT of code
> in the wild that embeds ipython in all manner of tools, and we'd be
> breaking all of that with this change.  While we're all on board with
> doing backwards-incompatible changes, it would be nice to keep *some*
> level of backwards compatibility, even if done with shim layers.  We
> could provide a few shims so embedding code like
>
> from IPython.Shell import IPShellEmbed
>
> continues to work for one or two more releases, with proper
> DeprecationWarnings raised.  But if we rename IPython -> ipython, I
> don't see a way to expose any backwards compatibility mechanism.  And
> I think all changes of this kind should strive for a fair balance
> between necessary evolution and limiting the damage for existing
> users: there's no absolute right answer here, just a matter of finding
> an acceptable compromise.
>

Could the current IPython package be cleaned up to cooperate with relative
package imports (using absolute_import from __future__)? Then packages that
require the old organization could include it as a subpackage of their own
projects, and the top-level ipython-1.0 can reorganize under ipython/.

Darren
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